Across North America, there is a rise in calls for police services to be abolished and defunded. These conversations are rooted in decades of concern over violence, discrimination and incidents of racial profiling against members of Black and Indigenous communities at the hands of police.
In Nova Scotia, a coalition of concerned citizens has created the Nova Scotia Policing Policy Working Group (NS PPWG) with the goal of bringing forward policy reforms that will increase public input on policing issues in the Halifax Regional Municipality.
The group will also examine how police resources are used and whether funds can be reallocated to better protect and serve different communities, particularly, Black and Indigenous communities.
“This working group is about delivering and developing common-sense policy interventions to do with how policing is conducted here in Halifax,” said Tari Ajadi, a political science PhD student at Dalhousie University.
“So, are we going to just sit around and wait for the Wortley report to gather dust? Or, are we going to actually implement some of the recommendations that are within it.”
Fifteen months have passed since the findings of the Halifax, Nova Scotia: Street Checks report were presented.
The Board of Police Commissioners chairwoman, Natalie Borden, says work on implementing Wortley report recommendations has been ongoing since the findings were released.
While street checks have since been banned in Nova Scotia, there is still one area of policing that requires more statistics to be gathered and tracked for data analysis. That call for a permanent data collection system to be established relates to all police stops of civilians.
It’s not the first time this type of recommendation has appeared in a report relating to concerns around racial biases and discrimination in policing.
In 2003, a Nova Scotia Human Rights tribunal found Halifax Regional Police officers guilty of discriminating against a Black man when he was pulled over based on his race.
Kirk Johnson, a world-famous boxer from North Preston, filed a human rights complaint against police and won.
While the racial profiling incident occurred in April 1998, it took several years for Johnson to win his human rights complaint.
“That wasn’t the first time he was stopped, wasn’t the first time he was racially profiled and in reality when he went into the police station the day following having been stopped, he was looking for an apology,” said Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard. “He did not get an apology, he did not get an acknowledgement that what happened to him was wrong.”
Bernard testified as an expert witness in Johnson’s case, based on research she conducted on the impacts of racism.
She says the research found that racism is a form of violence that negatively impacts all aspects of human health.
She says the study also showed that racism doesn’t just cause harm to the individual experiencing it.
“The impact is felt on whole communities. So, when I see what’s going on now, around the world, I’m seeing some of that unfolding. Some of that impact of racism, the impact of witnessing the racism and the demand that it’s time for change,” Bernard said.
The Wortley report recommends that a permanent data collection system be established to record information of all civilians stopped by police.
This includes information on the race, age and gender of the civilian being stopped.
A similar directive appeared over a decade ago in the Johnson decision.
“This is a matter of some urgency. The processes need to be really clear around the data gathering, the data analysis and the data usage and I would say the community would need to and want to be actively involved in helping to set what those parameters are and if that doesn’t happen, there would be a lot of mistrust,” Bernard said.
Nova Scotia Justice Minister Mark Furey says work is underway to follow through on this recommendation.
“I’m going to be reserved on timelines but we are working towards a committee that’s representative of community, academia and law enforcement to come up with a model to appropriately source and retain data that the Wortley report has identified,” Furey said.
Furey also says an apology from the justice department to the province’s Black community for the discriminatory acts shown in the Wortley report is also coming.
“I’ve been very clear that when the province of Nova Scotia makes an apology, it will be to the community and it will be a mechanism, or model, that includes community input and there will be substance behind that apology,” Furey said.
Furey says discussions around an apology are “very sensitive” and need to happen with direct community input.
Bernard says continuing to wait for institutional changes to address racism comes with significant risks to generations of Black families.
“When we’re saying there are certain things that you must do to protect yourself from the police — there’s something fundamentally wrong when that happens,” she said.
More information about anti-Black racism in Canada:
Racial profiling and racial discrimination against Black people is a systemic problem in Canada, according to numerous reports and experts.
Black Canadians account for 3.5 per cent of the country’s total population, according to the latest government statistics, but are over-represented in federal prisons by more than 300 per cent, as found by the John Howard Society.
A Black person is nearly 20 times more likely than a white person to be involved in a fatal shooting by Toronto police, a 2018 report by the Ontario Human Rights Commission found, and Black Canadians are more likely to experience inappropriate or unjustified searches during encounters and unnecessary charges or arrests. They’re also more likely to be held overnight by police than white people, according to the John Howard Society.
Black Canadians experience disparities in health outcomes compared to the population at large, according to research from the Black Health Alliance. The Black Experiences in Health Care Symposium Report notes that they often face barriers and discrimination within health-care systems. Black people report higher rates of diabetes and hypertension compared to white people, which researchers published in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health say may stem from experiences of racism in everyday life.
Indigenous Peoples, also experience poorer health outcomes and face discrimination within health-care systems and by police. According to Statistics Canada, Indigenous Peoples represent about five per cent of the population in Canada, and are grossly over-represented in the prison system — Indigenous men made up 28 per cent of male admissions to custody in 2017-18. According to the John Howard Society, Indigenous men are nearly eight times more likely to be murdered. According to the Canadian Department of Justice, Indigenous women and girls are more than three times more likely to experience sexual assault and violence and are between six and 12 times more likely to be killed, depending on the province or territory.
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