It’s been roughly six years since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a global conversation about anti-Black police violence and the excessive use of police force against Black and Indigenous communities.

Around the same time, in Toronto, the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet — who fell from the balcony of an apartment while police officers were present — elicited outrage in Canada.

But police violence — shootings and beatings resulting in serious injury, and sometimes even the death of civilians — has been an ongoing issue in Canada, particularly during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The shootings of Lester Donaldson (1988), Michael Wade Lawson (1988) and Raymond Lawrence (1992), to name a few, spurred community uprisings in the form of protests and political disruptions that eventually led to the 1995 report of the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System.

More than 30 years later, however, we know police institutions continue to use force disproportionately when interacting with Black, Indigenous and other racialized residents in Ontario.

Following the numbers

We have information about this topic because the 2017 Ontario Anti-Racism Act requires all public institutions, such as police services, to collect and release race-based data to address systemic racism.

A 2020 report by the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre found that despite making up only about 19 per cent of Hamilton’s population, roughly 38 per cent of use-of-force incidents in the region involved at least........

© The Conversation