The release of the much-awaited information illustrates the overrepresentation in the policing of different racial and gender groups
Indigenous and Black people have disproportionately higher contacts with police in the city, either as victims or perpetrators of crime, new race-based data collected by Calgary police show.
However, it also says officers do not use a higher amount of force on offenders in the two groups than other races.
The release of the much-awaited information illustrates the overrepresentation in the policing of different racial and gender groups. The data revolve around a few kinds of interactions with the police along with the use of force by officers — victims and offenders of violent crime, officer contacts, and missing people.
The data found of the 14,400 victims of violent crime between 2018 and 2023, 44 per cent of victims were white, eight per cent were Indigenous, seven per cent were Black and 24 per cent were people of other races.
The ratio of Indigenous victims of violent crime — including assault, sexual assault, robbery and threats — is 2.5 times more than the share of Indigenous people in Calgary’s population. Meanwhile, the ratio of Black victims to the share of Black people in Calgary is 1.4. The share of white victims is 11 percentage points lower than the proportion of white people in Calgary’s population.
Among all victims, 53 per cent were male and 48 per cent were female. However, female victims of assault and sex offences who were Indigenous were four times the proportion of Indigenous women in Calgary’s population.
Among offenders, Indigenous and Black offenders are higher than the share of Black and Indigenous people by six and two times. Males account for 75 percent of offenders, with almost half of all perpetrators being white, still lower than their respective share in Calgary’s population.
Approximately 30 per cent of offenders are repeat offenders.
Calgary police also recorded interactions between individuals and police officers, which included check-ins with people in vulnerable situations or investigating a call for service. The proportion of officer contacts involving Indigenous individuals doubled from eight per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent in 2023, while overrepresentation of Indigenous subjects in public call-for-service contacts declined from 3.8 times in 2018 to 2.7 times in 2023.
Most of these interactions took place in downtown or along CTrain stations. Also, the racial composition of people who were part of these interactions is similar to that of unhoused people, police data show.
CPS data also show the racial composition of those arrested is relatively proportionate to subjects with whom the police used physical force such as strikes or stun and intermediate force, which includes batons, firearms or pepper spray.
However, Indigenous females and males were overrepresented by 6.8 and 4.5 times, respectively, while Black males were overrepresented by 2.39 times their share of Calgary’s population.
“When you look at the over- and under-representation, it caused me to pause and think about it, and it makes me ask a lot of questions,” said Chad Tawfik, Calgary police deputy chief.
Data ‘a starting point’: deputy chief
“Our goal is to share the information, to increase transparency and accountability,” Tawfik said.
The data is not without its limitations. Police officers aren’t mandated to note the race of the individual they’re interacting with. Tawfik said between 60 and 70 per cent of officers performed the task. “So when we did the analysis, we leveraged different datasets to increase that reliability up to the 90 per cent of our record,” Tawfik added.
The proportion of different groups in Calgary’s population is extracted from the 2021 census and so isn’t reflective of the reality in 2024. And the races reported in the files were perceived by the police and weren’t self-identified. The information also doesn’t mention mental health calls or traffic stops due to the several complications that make it difficult to capture data.
The next stage, Tawfik said, would be to understand the story behind the numbers.
“The analysis is descriptive, doesn’t explain the why,” he said. “The next stage will also involve qualitative feedback from the community and other aspects — we understand the limitations, and it’s a starting point.”