Racism in the Toronto Police Force

 

The Toronto Police have released a report that “Toronto police officers use more force against Black people, more often.” 

“Our own analysis of our data from 2020 discloses that there is systemic discrimination in our policing,” [Acting Chief of Police] Ramer said. “That is, there is a disproportionate impact experienced by racialized people, particularly those of Black communities.”

Acting Chief Ramer has issued a public apology, which predictably has not been accepted by any of the spokespeople for the local black community interviewed by the media.

In fact, the statistics do not prove discrimination. An important variable has been omitted: do blacks commit crimes in disproportionate numbers? Are they disproportionately likely to be violent? If so, they would of course have more dealings with the police. Yet nobody even mentions this possibility.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that such a question is out of bounds. It must be accepted as an article of faith, on grounds of human equality, that specific demographic groups cannot possibly be committing crimes at higher rates. To suppose so would be racist.

Very well. Then we have a bigger problem than discrimination against blacks. Police are overwhelmingly more likely to confront and to use force against men than against women. 

How can we ignore this? How can we compound the offense by apologizing only to blacks, and not to men?

Or, if you insist, let’s admit that different groups might offend at different rates. If so, the evidence in the present report does not support the racism interpretation. If the problem is “white” officers being prejudiced against other races, why would the problem be for blacks specifically? Why wouldn’t they be equally or at least similarly prejudiced against other visible minorities?

The report does say other groups were also overrepresented in the statistics:

“If you are Indigenous, you were more likely to be subjected to a strip search, a highly invasive police practice; and members of the Latino, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian communities were also more likely to have force used against them.”

But what about the Chinese? What about the Japanese? What about East Indians, aka South Asians? They are visibly not “white,” more visibly so than Middle Easterners or Latinos. And yet they do not seem to have been disproportionately harassed by police.

“Southeast Asian” presumably means Vietnamese; possibly Filipino or Thai. Are they really visibly more distinct from the “white” majority than Chinese, Japanese, or Korean Canadians? Having lived in Korea, China, and the Philippines, I can attest that the typical East Asian cannot themselves consistently tell the difference among these groups by physical appearance. How can the racist police?

I also doubt that a typical racist cop could consistently tell the difference in a brief encounter or an emergency situation between a Hispanic or Middle Easterner and someone from Bangladesh or North India; or between a black and someone from South India. If they did, it would be on the basis of speech and behavior, not on any racial characteristic.

This leaves greater levels of crime based on culture as the obvious explanation. Some cultures are more inclined to crime, and violence, than others. We all know, for example, of the Italian Mafia. So too ISIS and Al Qaeda, the Mexican drug cartels, the Vietnamese Triads.

Is the police chief, and are those in authority generally, too stupid to see this? One would hope not. 

But then, why are they deliberately promoting this slander against their own police department?

It has to do with class prejudice. This report and apology will make policing harder and more expensive, and increase the rate of crime. It will particularly be harmful to the working class, including the “racialized” poor, who must live in high-crime areas.

But it has one great advantage: it increases the power of the bureaucracy over the ordinary police officer, who is scapegoated. It increases the power of the ruling class over the working class.

Divide and conquer. 

God help the fools who fall for it.