Public Safety committee  Thank you. I hope that I understand your first question correctly. You're asking what the biggest barriers are in addressing racial profiling in policing. Is that correct?

Public Safety committee  It's the data. Okay. Thank you. Yes, I'm happy to answer that. It's ridiculous in a Canadian context that we are so rarely offered the ability to have what should be publicly accessible data when it comes to race-based incidents. We often have to rely on access to information or

Public Safety committee  I think it's so important to highlight the way that Canada's history of slavery, which is so often erased, is so much a part of the ongoing surveillance of black communities across multiple systems, so I think, of course, that it's really important. I addressed the criminalizatio

Public Safety committee  Absolutely. The study I was highlighting was in the Yale Law Journal and was published in 2018. That was the most systematic study that looked at every study of body cameras that had been accomplished so far. It found that their use did not reduce police killings in black commun

Public Safety committee  It is American data. I am absolutely convinced, because of just how systemic a study it is, that it's the most informative to date. I think if we are going to make policy changes informed by research, then we simply must look at the research. The research has been quite clear tha

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the question. I believe that I am talking about reallocation to some extent, of course, as well as substantively cutting police budgets, but also about reducing the scope and power of police, just to clarify. I think it's very important to understand that these

Public Safety committee  Sure, absolutely. I'm beginning to conduct some research on this aspect. I've spoken with people who have been working since the 1980s—after the police killing of Anthony Griffin in 1987 in Montreal, for example. There was a massive community outcry, and what happened afterward

Public Safety committee  That was one part of it, reducing their scope from different situations, including the proactive policing of places where Black people live.

Public Safety committee  The studies on community policing are incredibly clear, particularly the recent study published by Dr. Rutland. Although originally many communities had aspirations of a positive relationship with the police, they ended up retrenching and even increasing police profiling with rac

Public Safety committee  I think we need to remember that the call for defunding is not only about removing police but about providing alternatives that would build safety that would not require policing. If we were to give an example, we can look to the policing of encampments in Toronto or Hamilton, w

Public Safety committee  Absolutely, and I think you're right that the numbers bear out that indigenous people, in particular indigenous women, also experience very significant rates of racial profiling in Canadian society. To continue on a bit with what I was trying to get at with my presentation—and t

Public Safety committee  No problem. I'm proposing that the assortment of changes forwarded under the banner of defunding the police are the most appropriate toward meaningfully addressing the issue of systemic racism in Canadian policing. Ending systemic racism requires that we undertake changes to min

Public Safety committee  All right. Well, we had to stop for a little while there, but I suppose I will—

Public Safety committee  Okay. In addition to reducing power, there is also reducing the militarization and of course building and supporting alternatives. To conclude, I would argue that acknowledging systemic racism is a step, but a systemic response is needed to get to the heart of the issue. The pu

Public Safety committee  Thank you for having me. I have published extensively in peer-reviewed literature on racial and gendered harms of policing in Canada's past and present, most notably Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. I am also a Ph.D. student and a Vanie