‘Toronto’s blacks 20 times more likely to be shot by police’

Black residents in Canada’s largest city of Toronto are 20 times more likely to be gunned down by police officers than white residents, an official report by a provincial human rights commission has revealed.

The damning report by the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) also found that the city’s black residents — who make up only 10 percent of Toronto’s population — account for 61 percent of all incidents involving police use of force and a whopping 70 percent of fatal shootings by police officers, UK-based daily The Guardian reported Monday.

The report was the result of an OHRC probe into the racial profiling of and discrimination against blacks by the Toronto Police Service, which studied seven years of data on interactions between police and black residents in the city.

‘A fractured relationship’

It said that black residents faced disproportionate discrimination and violence at the hands of city police forces. It also pointed out that the practice of “carding” — in which officers stop residents to collect personal information — “reveal[ed] a lack of legal basis” and often included “inappropriate or unjustified searches during encounters; and unnecessary charges or arrests.”

Describing the current relationship between Toronto’s police and its black residents as “fractured,” the report further said that encounters with police viewed as arbitrary or without proper reason run the risk of reducing the effectiveness of the city’s police service.

Toronto police conceded in a Monday statement to the long-running frustrations experienced by many residents in the city, who have been subjected to maltreatment by officers due to the color of their skin, saying, “We understand that this has created a sense of distrust that has lasted generations.”

Many years of malaise

Many observers in the city regarded the newly-released data as a mere confirmation of a reality they knew had long existed in Toronto.

“When it comes to law enforcement, when it comes to the police, there is an overarching reality of violence that is often a part of the fabric of everyday life for black people in this country,” said author of the book Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard. “I think this data is absolutely damning and reveals something very important.”

Toronto University Sociology Professor Akwasi Owusu-Bempah also said, “I’m absolutely not surprised by the findings because this is a discussion that we’ve been having in Toronto now that [has] been going on decades. Issues of race and policing and race in use of force are not unique to the American context. [They] have existed in Canada for quite some time.”

“That’s a problem that the police themselves cannot solve,” he added. “It’s a problem for policymakers and our society to acknowledge — that issues of poverty and disenfranchisement result in exposure to these types of practices.”

Expressing optimism that the report would help Canadians examine accounts of racial profiling and violence with a greater sense of empathy, he said, “These are people, they’re not just statistics. These are children, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.”

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