Toronto police chief apologizes to Black, Indigenous communities as new data on use of force released

An expansive Toronto police report released Wednesday confirms what many racialized people in the city have long said: Black, Indigenous and other diverse groups are disproportionately affected by use-of-force and strip searches by officers.

Toronto Police Chief James Ramer is discussing the data analysis at a morning news conference.

The never-before-seen statistics released today were drawn from records of 949 use of force incidents and 7,114 strip searches over the course of 2020. The granular analysis, compiled by the force's Equity, Inclusion and Human Rights Unit alongside outside data experts in concert with a 12-member community panel, examines a wide range of questions.

Among its findings was that Black, Indigenous and Middle Eastern people were all overrepresented in the number of "enforcement actions'' taken against them relative to their total population in Toronto. For Black residents, it was by a factor of 2.2 times.

Similarly, Black, Latino, East/Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern people were overrepresented by factors of 1.6 times, 1.5 times, 1.2 times and 1.2 times, respectively, when it came to use of force.

Police also tended to use a higher degree of force against racialized groups compared to white people, especially when it came to officers drawing their firearms. 

Black, South Asian and East/South Asian people were considerably more likely than white people -- 1.5 times, 1.6 times and two times, respectively -- to have an officer point a firearm at them during 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 Services Board approved a data policy that would start with use of force and later extend to other police processes such as stops, searches, questioning and the laying of charges.

The use of force data was taken in part from reports that officers submit to the Ministry of the Solicitor General after interactions that necessitate medical attention for community members, as well as any time an officer draws or uses a firearm or Taser, or uses another weapon such as their baton or pepper spray.

The 949 use of force instances reported in 2020 account for 0.2 per cent of the 692,937 recorded police interactions with the public. Firearms were pointed in 371 of those encounters and used in four, two of which were fatal, according to police.

The release of the data comes in the wake of several recent reports from human rights and police complaint watchdogs that called for major reforms within Toronto police.

In 2018, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) concluded that Black people were "grossly overrepresented" in several types of violent police interactions, including use-of-force cases, shootings, deadly encounters and fatal shootings.

The OHRC reported that between 2013 and 2017 in Toronto, a Black person was nearly 20 times more likely than a white person to be shot and killed by police.

A follow-up analysis by the OHRC released in 2020 found that Black people are also more likely than others to be arrested and charged during interactions with Toronto police.