“For this, as Chief of Police and on behalf of the police, I am sorry and unreservedly apologize,” Toronto Police Chief James Ramer told a morning news conference. “Publishing this data will cause pain to many. We need to improve and do better,” he said. “As difficult as these findings are, we recognize that this is one of the most important work we have ever done.” Statistics never seen before, released today, come from a record of 949 incidents of violence and 7,114 investigations during 2020. The detailed analysis, compiled by the Force Equality, Integration and Human Rights Unit with external experts in consultation with a 12-member community panel, examines a wide range of questions. Among its findings were that blacks, Indigenous peoples and Middle Easterners were overrepresented in the number of “enforcement actions” taken against them in relation to their total population in Toronto. For black residents, it was 2.2 times. Similarly, blacks, Latins, East / Southeast Asians, and Middle Easterners were over-represented with 1.6 times, 1.5 times, 1.2 times, and 1.2 times, respectively, in terms of the use of force. Police also tended to use a higher degree of violence against racist groups than whites, especially when it came to police officers who drew their firearms. Blacks, South Asians, and East / South Asians were much more likely than whites – 1.5 times, 1.6 times, and twice, respectively – to have an officer point a gun at them. the duration of an interaction. Ontario requires the public sector to collect race-based data as part of the Anti-Racism Act, and in 2019 the Toronto Police Council approved a data policy that would begin with the use of force and later expand to other police processes. such as stops. investigations, interrogations and indictments. The use of force data was obtained in part from reports submitted by officers to the Attorney General’s Office following interactions requiring medical care for members of the community, as well as whenever an officer draws or uses a firearm or Taser or uses another weapon such as a cane. or pepper spray. The 949 cases of violence reported in 2020 represent 0.2 percent of the 692,937 recorded police interactions with the public. The firearms were used in 371 of those clashes and were used in four, two of which were fatal, according to police.
TPS admits it has “abused” race-based data in the past
The release of the data comes in the wake of several recent reports by human rights watchdogs and police calling for major reforms to the Toronto police. In 2018, the Ontario Commission on Human Rights (OHRC) came to this conclusion Blacks were “overrepresented” in various types of violent police interactionsincluding use of force, shootings, deadly encounters and deadly shootings. The OHRC reported that between 2013 and 2017 in Toronto, a black man was almost 20 times more likely than a white man to be shot and killed by police. A follow-up analysis by the OHRC released in 2020 found that Blacks are also more likely than others to be arrested and charged during interactions with Toronto police. In its new report, the force acknowledged that it has “misused” data based on past matches. This is an obvious reference to carding – the practice of collecting identification information during random road checks – which the province significantly reduced in 2017. Any identification information for both members of the public and officers was removed from the data used for the use of force and the analysis of the investigation, police said.
Reforms have led to a dramatic drop in strip searches
The survey released Wednesday also looked at whether any racial groups were disproportionately represented in the strip surveys. The results show that indigenous peoples are 1.3 times more underrepresented than those present at the arrests. Meanwhile, black and whites were 1.1 times overrepresented. Toronto police re-examined their strip investigation procedures in October 2020, leading to a dramatic reduction in the number of investigations since then. Prior to the changes, about 27 percent of all arrests that year involved heap searches. That dropped to four about five percent later. The policy changes included that all lane searches were authorized by a supervisor and controlled by senior management. The reforms helped end the over-representation of indigenous peoples in strip surveys in 2021, the analysis concluded. But racial divisions remained for the black-and-white residents arrested. The changes were introduced after a 2019 report from the Office of the Independent Police Review Director found that Unnecessary and illegal strip searches have become a common practice between police forces in Ontario. The report released this morning also includes 38 actions that the force says will help address racial differences in incidents of violence and stripping investigations. Speaking to the media on Tuesday, a police official said an online checklist would monitor the force’s progress in implementing the actions in the coming months and years.
