It’s an interesting milestone for a city, but one Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson is proud to tout.
“For the first time in our history, the majority of people in Vancouver speak a first language other than English, and that’s a view into the much wider world, a diverse world that it is,” Robertson said, speaking at the Cities Summit convention in Vancouver this week.
The immigrant population in Vancouver is booming, as it is in much of Canada. The 2006 Census counted 6.1 million foreign-born residents in Canada, accounting for 19.8 percent of the population. All of this makes it odd to see a new report looking at how the majority of police agencies are not tracking race in their official reports.
"Whitewashing Criminal Justice in Canada: Preventing Research through Data Suppression" appears in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society and finds that most police agencies don’t keep track of race, and when they do it’s inconsistent. This lack of information is in the face of recent studies showing that blacks are over-represented in local police stops and that Aboriginals are over-represented in Canadian prisons.
Whitewashing Criminal Justice in Canada: Preventing Research through Data Suppression
Race and racism have long played an important role in Canadian law1 and continue to do so. However, conducting research on race and criminal justice in Canada is difficult given the lack of readily available data that include information about race.2 We show that data on the race of victims and accused persons are being suppressed by police organizations in Canada and argue that suppression of race prevents quantitative anti-racism research while not preventing the use of these data by the police for racial profiling. We also argue that when powerful institutions, such as the police, have knowledge that they keep secret or refuse to discover, it serves the interests of those institutions at the expense of the public. Fears that reporting of racial data will result in racial profiling or the stigmatization of racialized communities are not assuaged by the repression of this information. Stigmatization may still occur, and racial profiling can continue to happen, but without public knowledge. Quantitative anti-racist research requires consistent, institutionalized reporting of race data through all aspects of Canadian justice. We outline what data are available, what data are needed, and where consistency is lacking. It is argued that institutional preferences for whitewashed data, with race and ethnicity removed, should be subrogated to transparency.
More Info: Millar, P., & Owusu-Bempah, A. (2011). Whitewashing justice in Canada: Preventing research Through Data Suppression. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 26(3), 653-661.
Research Interests: View on muse.jhu.edu.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca
"Suppressing race statistics makes quantitative anti-racism research impossible. Further, failure to collect data does not prevent racial profiling. Stigmatization may still occur but without public knowledge of it," the authors write.
And as in Vancouver, the immigrant population in most Canadian cities is on the rise. In most Canadian cities, the amount of immigrants is slightly higher than the amount of "visible minorities" – a classification defined by the Employment Equity Act as "persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour." This chart shows the minority population as a percentage of the whole in the ten most populous cities in the country. (All of this is based on figures from the 2006 Census. 2011 figures are not yet available.) >>more<<
No comments:
Post a Comment