The Inquiry that Didn't Inquire
by John FitzGerald, publisher emeritus, NEW IMPROVED HEAD.
[Editor's note: Since the author of this article is uncharacteristically interested in using it to persuade people, he has, with difficulty, drastically reduced the amount of cheap sarcasm you have come to expect from NEW IMPROVED HEAD. He promises a return to NIH tradition with his next article, however.]This week the Ontario Human Rights Commission released Paying the Price: The Human Cost of Racial Profiling, the report of an inquiry into "the effects of racial profiling on individuals, families, communities and society as a whole" (p. 1). The title of the report may lead you to suspect that the inquiry failed to fulfil its mandate, and that will be one of the conclusions I draw in this article. First, though, I would like to make three things perfectly clear.Those three things are:
- I believe that racial profiling occurs.
- I believe it is a serious social problem.
- I believe that vigorous steps should be taken to eradicate it.
Now that that's out of the way we can get on with the review of this report. If you're interested in following along with a copy of the report handy, it may be downloaded here.
The report defines racial profiling as "any action undertaken for reasons of safety, security or public protection that relies on stereotypes about race, colour, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, or place of origin rather than on reasonable suspicion, to single out an individual for greater scrutiny or different treatment" (emphasis as in the report, p. 6 – p. 10 in the PDF). The authors acknowledge that the definition is broad, but it has the merit of being clear.
The Commission believes that earlier studies it and others have performed demonstrate the existence of racial profiling, so Paying the Price also assumes that it exists, which is fair. Anyway, if you're demonstrating its effects on society then you're demonstrating its existence, too.
The report describes studies demonstrating the ineffectiveness of racial profiling and of the negative consequences it has for society – creating mistrust of institutions, alienation, fear, feelings of helplessness, of being intimidated, and so on. This section constitutes a highly appropriate introduction to the report.
So – how did the Commission assess the effects of racial profiling? Well, it put ads in newspapers and sent "information...to approximately 1000 individuals and organizations" (p. 1). Over eight hundred people then contacted the inquiry to describe their experiences, about half the reports being of actual racial profiling. What did the commission do with these more than 400 accounts of racial profiling?
It didn't do enough. It didn't assess their validity. It didn't assess how typical they were. As the report blithely states, it is "not about numbers or statistics" (p. 4). How you assess the effect on society of racial profiling without compiling numbers and statistics is not made clear. All that the inquiry seems to have done with the submissions made to it is to categorize them and to quote them (the report is chock full of quotations from individual submissions).
In other words, this is a work of qualitative research. Its goal is to categorize verbal products. In settling for a wholly qualitative research model, however, the inquiry made a fatal mistake. The purpose of qualitative research is to develop hypotheses. It explicitly does not test hypotheses, an enterprise which requires the statistical models of quantitative research. Consequently, the report compiled no measures of racial profiling, and consequently says nothing about the incidence of racial profiling or the extent of the damage wrought by it, issues which are central to the estimation of its effect on society and consequently to the development of recommendations for dealing with it.
Racial profiling creates mistrust of institutions. How widespread is this mistrust in Ontario? Paying the Price doesn't tell you.
Racial profiling creates alienation. How widespread is this alienation in Ontario? Paying the Price doesn't tell you.
Racial profiling creates fear, feelings of helplessness, and feelings that one is being intimidated. How widespread are these feelings in Ontario? Paying the Price doesn't tell you.
Before making recommendations to combat racial profiling you have to know how widespread it is, and you have to know whether or not it is systemic. The authors of Paying the Price, however, chose not to pursue those issues.
Is racial profiling common in the schools? Is it endemic? The inquiry heard from people who said it was practised in the schools, and in particular from people who said zero tolerance policies for violence were penalizing minority students disproportionately. However, the inquiry did not attempt to find out whether those assertions were valid or to assess independently the extent of racial profiling in the schools.
It would be reasonable to expect the Commission to inquire into whether racial profiling by police is a matter of individual initiative or of the corporate culture of police departments or of deliberate policy before making recommendations to deal with the problem. But they did not.
I think we all know that racial profiling affects aboriginal people, and the inquiry is to be commended for considering the possibility that the racial profiling of aboriginal people operates differently from other forms of racial profiling. However, although in its investigation of racial profiling of aboriginal peoples it came across some interesting ideas, it did not follow them up. For example, it noted Roger Obonsawin's contention that racial profiling of aboriginal people is exacerbated by their tendency to blame themselves when unpleasant things happen to them and to try not to attract attention to themselves. This observation illustrates forcefully the necessity of objectively determining the extent of racial profiling – since it suggests that basing estimates of the frequency of racial profiling on self-report may produce underestimates – but no attempt was made to determine it.
The section on racial profiling of aboriginal peoples is also marred by a complete lack of proportion. For example, the failure of a Toronto Transit Commission ticket-taker to honour an aboriginal man's day pass because the date was smudged is presented as an example of having "to go to unusual extremes to prove [a] legitimate right to use public services such as public transit" (p. 62). Maybe the date on the day pass was just smudged, and maybe a white person with a smudged date on his day pass would have had his refused, too. This example doesn't seem to qualify as an unusual extreme, or to fall within the definition of racial profiling used by the inquiry.
And is the Commission asserting that it is the policy of the Toronto Transit Commission to refuse aboriginal peoples' day passes? That question may sound silly, but it's a question of a type that should have been asked about every incident reported to the inquiry. It is only reasonable to expect the inquiry to be interested in determining whether the incidents reported to it were evidence of systemic racism or were the work of individual racists. It's at least reasonable to ask what recourse the TTC offers an aboriginal person who believes his day pass is unreasonably refused. But again the inquiry chose not to pursue this line of...inquiry.
When we review what the investigative phase of the inquiry accomplished, we find that in a province with over 2 million members of visible minorities and nearly 200,000 aboriginal people it managed to round up 400 reports of racial profiling. If we assume that adults make up about half the people who would be victims of racial profiling, that's one report for about every 3,000 potential adult victims. Of course, the small number of reports doesn't disprove the assertion that racial profiling is widespread. However, it is definitely a sign that the inquiry did not know what it was doing. It used research methods which failed to produce data. Anybody with a modicum of energy and initiative and even a modest grasp of the topic could have collected much more data than that, and much more interesting and relevant data.
The inquiry then made recommendations. Unfortunately, it didn't recommend much. Faced with a problem whose serious implications and consequences it well understood, it chose to phrase most of its recommendations vaguely.
Of 19 recommendations, only seven recommend specific actions. The rest recommend "taking [unspecified] steps", "developing policies", "reviewing practices", "accepting and acknowledging the existence of racial profiling", "considering effects", "discussing concerns", "undertaking consultation", "undertaking [unspecified] measures", and "providing staff with [unspecified] support".
I was dumfounded by the one and only recommendation about the profiling of aboriginal people:
With respect to Aboriginal persons, organizations or institutions involved in the delivery of services to the Aboriginal community should review their practices to ensure that they are adapted to the unique needs of Aboriginal persons and that their staff is properly trained in issues concerning the Aboriginal community.Racist treatment of aboriginal people is a well established fact, but all the inquiry has to recommend to the organizations that may be profiling them is that they "review their practices"! Surely we need to institute rules and procedures to ensure that racial profiling of aboriginal people is detected, reversed, and punished, but instead the inquiry decided just to recommend a review of organizational practices, a review to be performed by the organizations themselves!The report does recommend setting up a Racial Diversity Secretariat to deal with racial issues. The functions of this secretariat are described only vaguely, however. It will "facilitate dialogue" (p. 68). It will "ensure that racial diversity and equity are respected"(p. 68). It will "report annually on issues of racism" (p. 68). But search as closely as you might among the extensive description of the functions of this secretariat and you will not find anything along the lines of "detecting and reversing decisions based on racial profiling and punishing the perpetrators of them."
And after all the talk about racial profiling in the schools, the only recommendation made for the school system is that "the Ministry of Education should incorporate anti-discrimination and diversity training in the elementary and secondary school curriculum" (p. 72). The inquiry concerned itself in particular with the possibly discriminatory effects of policies of zero tolerance of violence. As far as the inquiry was concerned, though, the problem of minority students being expelled disproportionately often for violence (if it is indeed a problem) is to be solved by training students not to discriminate! All the people who run the school system will have to do is discuss concerns, consider effects, undertake consultation, etc.
The recommendations which describe specific actions to be taken are adequate, but they all could have been made without conducting the inquiry. For example, putting video cameras in police cruisers is a good idea, not only as a means of combatting racial profiling but as protection both for the police and for citizens in general. Video cameras are successfully used in police cruisers in other jurisdictions. We did not need to talk to 400 people to figure out that that's a good idea.
And getting people to implement recommendations about racial profiling that they haven't implemented yet is a good idea, but we didn't need another public inquiry to come up with it, or with the idea that police and security guards should wear name tags.
In the end the report does not come up with anything original which would substantially advance the interests of the people of Ontario, the interests of aboriginal people, the interests of members of visible minorities, or the interests of anybody else.
In the end the committee just seemed unwilling to apply itself or to make recommendations that might discommode important people. If school boards' zero tolerance policies are examples of racial profiling, then you have to make school board officials do something about them. Instead, the inquiry chose only to recommend that students get diversity training. Of course, before you make recommendations about zero tolerance policies it helps to establish first that they are examples of racial profiling, but the inquiry chose not to do that, either.
We have a new government in Ontario, and it needs to be encouraged to strike a committee of people who are willing to make recommendations for specific and effective procedures to detect and to punish racial profiling. So far, though, the government has been content to order people around. It has told the Toronto police to get on with dealing with racial profiling. The inquiry didn't estimate its frequency among police, didn't investigate its causes, and produced no suggestions for dealing with it other than putting cameras in the cars and wearing name tags, but the police are supposed to figure out how to deal with it.
Racial profiling is a problem that requires appropriate and effective action. Paying the Price, though, proposes only a few specific actions which do not address either the causes or the functions of racial profiling. We need a real study of racial profiling in Ontario. If we do not get it, racial profiling will continue.
The Inquiry that Didn't Inquire © Coolth, 2003
Posted on December 11, 2003
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