Government ignores Racial Profiling Study

Two years after a controversial study on racial profiling was conducted in Kingston, the city's police chief says he'd never again subject his officers to the process unless it was sanctioned by the government.

Kingston Police Chief William Closs said his greatest disappointments since the 2005 release of the Bias-Free Policing report have been inaction on the part of the province and reluctance of other police departments to take the same introspective look at policing.

"There's not a single politician anywhere in Ontario that has expressed one iota of interest in what we learned from the project," he said.

Bureaucrats don't want to talk about it and police departments won't subject their own officers to this type of data collection without direction from the upper echelons of the law enforcement community, said Closs.

"No other police department in Ontario, or Canada for that matter, is ever going to do this because politicians have their heads buried in the sand," he said. "Basically, they're cowards."

Ontario Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services Monte Kwinter told Sun Media that he didn't agree with the report at the time it was produced and he doesn't agree with it today.

"The McGuinty government does not believe that keeping race-based statistics is the answer to concerns about the relationship between police and visible minorities," he said.

ANTI-RACISM TRAINING

Legislation prohibiting racist or discriminatory behaviour by police already exists under the Police Services Act, which requires officers to demonstrate sensitivity to the multicultural and multiracial character of society.

Anti-racism training is also provided through the Ontario Police College.

In June 2003, the Kingston Police Services Board approved a one-year pilot project that would record race-based statistics. Between Oct. 1, 2003 and Sept. 30, 2004, police officers collected data on the age, gender and race of people they stopped.

The data was then handed over to University of Toronto professor Scot Wortley, who found blacks were three times more likely to be stopped by police than whites. The numbers for young black males between 15 and 24 were even more dramatic -- they were five times more likely to be stopped by police.

Aboriginals were 1.4 times more likely to attract police attention than whites.

The report caused a stir among the policing community and the Kingston force's own ranks.

Much of the criticism was directed at the chief for having exposed his officers to public scrutiny.

But there were those who recognized the advantages of having such data collected, among them several national and North American agencies representing Natives and African-Americans, as well as anti-racism, human rights and educational institutions.

DIVERSITY PROGRAMS

Many in Kingston rallied behind the force, which has since used the data as a foundation for diversity-training programs for its officers.

Joe Couto of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police said individual police services must address the issue of bias-free policing independently and the Kingston study might not be relevant to other police services.

"I would respectfully say that the issue hasn't been ignored, but it's one in policing that is certainly studied and it informs the individual practices of police services," he said.

Although this type of study regarding bias in policing is unique in Canada, it's commonplace among forces in the U.S., said Paul McKenna, president of Public Safety Innovation, a Toronto-based consulting firm.

"This is a very important combination where police departments reach out to academics to design and pursue and then evaluate serious operational issues," he said. "That really should be the model for how all police services operate."

Closs remains adamant that his force reaped benefits from the study's findings, but he's reluctant to have his officers do any further such research.

"In doing this project by ourselves, without any support from anyone, we exposed the heart and soul of the Kingston police department to criticism," he said.

"While it was the right thing to do, I would never subject my officers to that process again unless it was at least sanctioned or supported by the Ontario government or a police-type body."