CPS admits the report has limitations. However, two experts say these gaps undermine the reliability of the numbers presented by the police
Four years ago, the voices of advocates for racial equity coalesced into an urgent demand: the collection of race-based data by Calgary police.
The rationale behind this ask was that the data would lay bare in statistical terms the discrimination that many racial groups face while interacting with officers.
On Wednesday, Calgary police delivered — but for some, the rigour of the force’s collection and compilation of information fell below their expectations.
Among other elements, the study delved into different kinds of crime, including property offences and domestic, non-domestic and sexual assaults, along with the proportion of different races as victims and offenders.
The reports also differentiated between disproportionality — which is a comparison between the share of each race as victims or offenders and the share of their group in the city’s population — and disparity, which is the state of inequality between races.
A much-anticipated part of the data was use of force. The report found a disproportionate number of Indigenous and Black people were subjects of force, although the amount of force was evenly distributed across all races. Contributing to the conclusion is the finding that the racial makeup of those arrested is relatively proportionate to the subjects of force.
CPS admits the report has limitations. However, two experts say these gaps undermine the reliability of the numbers presented by the police.
First, only about 65 per cent of police officers recorded the race of individuals they interacted with.
“Within the disaggregated data, there’s about 35 per cent for which we know nothing about the race of subjects who came into contact with Calgary police officers,” said Temitope Oriola, criminology professor at the University of Alberta.
“Thirty-five per cent is quite massive a gap to have in any kind of analysis.”
Underlining the problem is that there is no mandate for police officers to collect that sort of information, Chad Tawfik, deputy chief of CPS, said in a news conference on Wednesday.
Tawfik said he’d like a national framework that requires officers to record the individual’s race while hoping the report encourages more police officers to fill in those missing boxes of information. However, it is unclear if CPS can mandate the requirement themselves.
Lawyer points to weaknesses, those released without charges
What complicates this problem further is the recorded race of the individual is based on police’s perception.
“There are a lot of Indigenous folks out there who pass as white, and there are also Afro-Indigenous folks who are read as Black,” said Amy Matychuk, a prison justice lawyer in Calgary.
Wells was then left face down in handcuffs, leg restraints and a spit mask for several minutes until he became unresponsive and soon died.
A noteworthy fact, Matychuk said, was that nowhere in the report was Wells’s racial identity reported.
“It’s a great example of the weaknesses of making big data extrapolations out of just officer perception of race,” she said, hoping the police do not look at their numbers from their report and “pat themselves on the back and figure they don’t need to do anything else because that’s clearly not true, and we know that from Mr. Wells’s situation.”
CPS’s report outlining the use of force at one point states that two-thirds of people who were subjected to force were charged with an offence. Matychuk wonders about those who weren’t charged and, as a result, may not have been recorded in the system.
“If force is being used against people, and they’re being detained and arrested and then they’re being released without charges, I have concerns about what that says about Calgary police officers’ judgment.”
‘It is somewhat late to the game’
What’s also missing from the studies is firearm discharges and mental health calls, the latter of which police officials say is complicated by differences between one-off flare-ups and an actual diagnosis, and a mix of different categories.
“I do think that any race-based data needs to be understood alongside data about mental illness,” Matychuk said.
The data presented by the police is a descriptive analysis, which is a summary of existing information, as opposed to a statistical analysis that allows for the predictability of certain instances and conclusions about their occurrences.
“They didn’t necessarily set out to do any kind of robust statistical analysis and they only set out to do what is essentially descriptive statistics,” Oriola said.
“And that’s not to say it’s not useful,” he added, although he admitted the information does not add anything new to what trends across the country have previously shown.
“It is somewhat late to the game, but again, better late than never.”