Inflammatory rhetoric? Baseless accusations? A response to Gabor's critique of racial profiling research in Canada.

• Author: Wortley, Scot
• Position: Response to Thomas Gabor, Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, vol. 46, p. 457, July 2004 - Canada

Racial profiling has emerged as one of the most important--and controversial--issues facing the Canadian criminal justice system. Much of the current public debate can be attributed to a series of articles on the relationship between race, crime, and criminal justice published by the Toronto Star in October 2002 (Rankin, Quinn, Shephard, Simmie, and Duncanson 2002a, 2002b, 2002c). However, it must be stressed that this topic has been a major concern of racial minority communities for several decades (see discussion in Ontario, Commission on Systemic Racism 1995; Henry 1994). Not surprisingly, the lines are clearly drawn with respect to the racial profiling debate. Social activists and black community organizations, on the one hand, have long maintained that the police frequently stop and search black citizens solely because of their racial characteristics (e.g., for the "offence" of driving while black). Police representatives, on the other hand, consistently deny allegations of facial profiling and claim that race has absolutely no influence on their decision-making processes. For example, Julian Fantino, Chief of the Toronto Police Service, states that "We do not do racial profiling ... there is no racism ... We don't look at, nor do we consider race or ethnicity, or any of that, as factors of how we dispose of cases, or individuals, or how we treat individuals (quoted in "There is no racism" 2002).

In our opinion, it is the responsibility of Canada's criminology community to make attempts to collect, analyse, and report on empirical data that might help address this explosive issue. Such data might help bring police and minority communities closer together and lead to the development of meaningful policy initiatives. Of course, because of the sensitive nature of the topic, we would expect that any academic discussion of racial profiling would pay particular attention to the accurate reporting of relevant facts. Unfortunately, we feel that accuracy in reporting was not at all present in a commentary on facial profiling that appeared in a recent issue of the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Indeed, Thomas Gabor's piece entitled "Inflammatory Rhetoric on Racial Profiling Can Undermine Police Services" made several major mistakes with respect to our profiling research in Toronto (Gabor 2004). We feel that such a misrepresentation of our research findings--especially in Canada's leading criminology journal--could have a negative impact on future data collection endeavours and ultimately damage efforts to reduce racism in policing. Thus, we would like to take this opportunity to highlight Gabor's misrepresentation of our findings and clarify the implications of our research results.

Definitional issues

In a previous article, published in this journal, we provided the following definition of racial profiling:

In the criminological literature, racial profiling is said to exist when the members of certain racial or ethnic groups become subject to greater levels of criminal justice surveillance than others. Racial profiling, therefore, is typically defined as a racial disparity in police stop and search practices, racial differences in Customs searches at airports and bordercrossings, increased police patrols in racial minority neighbourhoods and undercover activities or sting operations which selectively target particular ethnic groups. (Wortley and Tanner 2003: 369-370) This definition was provided in direct response to a report, written by sociologist Edward Harvey, that critiqued the Toronto Star's race-crime series. In his report, Harvey provides a reanalysis of Toronto police arrest data in order to claim that there is no evidence of racial profiling in the Toronto region. Harvey's reanalysis finds that black people are greatly over-represented in drug trafficking arrests and out-of-sight traffic offences. Nonetheless, he argues that the fact that white people are over-represented in other arrest categories (i.e., prostitution and DUI charges) proves that racial profiling does hot exist (Harvey 2003). We provided the above definition simply to illustrate that Harvey's investigation, in our opinion, had not actually dealt with the literature on racial profiling We wanted to highlight, for example, that Harvey had totally ignored research on police stop and search activities. Furthermore, we wanted to stress that although the over-representation of minorities in arrest statistics may indeed be one consequence of racial profiling, this over-representation could also reflect actual racial differences in criminal offending (Wortley and Tanner 2003: 370).

Gabor (2004) is quite critical of our definition of racial profiling. He writes that

My concern is chat this definition fails to distinguish between law enforcement practices that are based on pure bigotry and those that may be entirely reasonable as a result of systematic analyses of crime patterns, intelligence work, and information obtained from the community ... Wortley and Tanner's definition appears to include any police operation aimed at a criminal network of minority persons or conducted in a minority neighbourhood. Their definition of racial profiling includes increased police activity in a minority community even where segments of that community seek additional protection or where crime patterns indicate the need for greater police presence. (Gabor 2004: 458-459) We agree, in general, with Gabor's critique of our definition. Clearly, out definition should also have stressed that racial profiling exists when race itself--not other legitimate variables--is a significant factor in making police surveillance decisions. In other words, facial profiling exists when racial differences in law enforcement surveillance activities cannot be totally explained by facial differences in criminal activity, traffic violations, calls for service, or other legally relevant variables. We did feel that such an understanding was implicit in out original definition. Out mistake was in failing to make these ideas explicit. However, as discussed below, we definitely attempt to control for such factors in out own facial profiling research. In sum, we appreciate Gabor's comments regarding out definition of facial profiling and will try to incorporate some of his ideas into out future work. We are not so appreciative, however, of his misinterpretation of our research findings.

Evidence of racial profiling: Gabor's misrepresentation of survey results

In an article entitled "Data, Denials, and Confusion: The Racial Profiling Debate in Toronto," we discuss findings from a recent survey of Toronto high school students (Wortley and Tanner 2003). The results from this survey, in our opinion, strongly suggest that black youth are much more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than youth from other facial backgrounds. However, under the pejorative subtitle "The Perils of Baseless Accusations," Gabor vehemently attacks the validity of out research findings. In order to defend out work, we will take the reader through Gabor's comments step by step.

Gabor begins his critique by stating that "one example of the misuse of the term 'facial profiling' is found in Wortley and Tanner. They cite their own study of high school students as providing evidence of this phenomena. In their survey, a higher percentage of black than white, Asian, or South Asian students indicated that they had been stopped and questioned by the police more than once over the past two years" (2004: 461). Not surprisingly, we do not think that our research has "misused" the term "racial profiling." Nevertheless, Gabor is correct in stating that we did indeed observe racial differences in police stops. Gabor does not, however, discuss the magnitude of these racial differences, nor the fact that black students are also much more likely than students from other racial backgrounds to report being physically searched by the police.

Gabor continues his commentary by stating that "Wortley and Tanner also acknowledge 'that students who engage in various forms of crime and deviance are much more likely to receive police attention than students who do hot break the law.' Wortley and Tanner's survey also revealed that students spending more of their time in public spaces are more likely to be stopped by the police than those spending their time in private spaces or in the company of their parents" (2004: 461). We have no problem with this passage. It is quite consistent with our survey results, and, in fact, we provide several examples in our article (Wortley and Tanner 2003: 371-373).

Gabor's next statement, however, is extremely problematic. He writes that "the authors then concede that their data do not allow them to determine whether the greater police attention received by black students is due to their skin colour or whether it is due to higher levels of criminality and their greater use of public spaces. In fact, black students reported more violence and minor property crime. Why, then, the pejorative term 'facial profiling' when the police may simply be doing their job?" (2004: 461). This statement by Gabor is completely incorrect and totally misrepresents our data analysis and research findings. First of all, we never come close to conceding that out data do not permit us to determine whether black students are stopped because of their race or because of their criminal behaviour and use of public spaces. We challenge Professor Gabor to locate such a statement in any of our writings or public statements. In fact, a thorough reading of our article would reveal that we can and do statistically control for these variables in our multivariate analysis. The following passage from our article, which Gabor apparently did not consider, illustrates this point:

Do black students receive more police attention because they are more involved in crime and more likely to be involved in leisure...