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Whitewashing Criminal Justice in Canada: Preventing Research through Data Suppression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Paul Millar  and
Akwasi Owusu-Bempah
Paul Millar
Affiliation:
Criminal Justice and Legal Studies, Nipissing University, 100 College Drive, Box 5002, North Bay, ON P1B 8L7, Canada, paulmi@nipissingu.ca
Akwasi Owusu-Bempah
Affiliation:
Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, 14 Queen's Park Crescent West, Toronto, ON M5S 3K1, Canada, a.o.bempah@utoronto.ca
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Extract

Race and racism have long played an important role in Canadian law 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. 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 white-washed data, with race and ethnicity removed, should be subrogated to transparency.

Type
Problems in Accessing Information: A Collection of Essays
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , December 2011 , pp. 653 - 661
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 2011

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20 Although the categories for response are the same (e.g., White, Chinese, South Asian, Black, and so on), the GSS words the question differently from the census.

21 Called Public Use Micro-Files (PUMFs) by Statistics Canada.

22 The Canadian Employment Equity Act defines “visible minorities” as “persons, other than Aboriginal persons, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.” Under this definition, regulations specify that the following groups are included in the visible minority population: Chinese, South Asians, Blacks, Arabs, West Asians, Filipinos, Southeast Asians, Latin Americans, Japanese, Koreans, and other visible minority groups, such as Pacific Islanders. Chui, T., Tran, K., and Maheux, H., Canada's Ethnocultural Mosaic: The 2006 Census (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2008)Google Scholar, catalogue no. 97-562-X.

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28 Race data may or may not be collected: the data we show indicate whether it is reported to the Centre for Justice Statistics (CJS): police departments in Canada provide all data to CJS voluntarily.

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