What now?
After damning numbers from Canada’s largest municipal police force proving what Black and other racialized communities have known for decades — that Toronto police have indeed used disproportionate force against them — the question now is what accountability might look like.
Ask Black Lives Matter Canada co-founder Sandy Hudson and the answer is one she and countless other community activists have been calling for for years: “Defund the police.”
Leave it to the CBC to platform a crank from the BLM scam to plug a bogus report. These are not serious people.
Read an informed take on the bogus report from Bob Scale via Lorrie Goldstein
The findings and conclusions in the Toronto “Race and Identity” report and the Police Chief’s confession and apology will have repercussions for law enforcement agencies across Canada and the US.
Most of the “Race and Identity” report uses typical population-based benchmarks to measure racial disparities in policing data. This methodology produces predictable disparities for certain racial/ethnic groups. Any qualified academic researcher would have said that these quantitative disparities cannot be used to prove that Toronto police officers are engaged in discriminatory practices, just as the absence of racial disparities would not mean that the police are bias free. Unfortunately, the researcher hired to produce this report and the Chief of Police have incorrectly claimed that the statistical disparities found in the report prove conclusively that there is systemic racism in the Toronto Police Service.
