This story originally appeared in the Toronto Star on Oct. 26, 2002, with the headline “Black crime rates highest.” This correction ran the following day:

A story on Page A1 yesterday about a racial breakdown of violent crime arrest data said the black population has the highest rate of arrest in Toronto. The headline accompanying the story inaccurately labelled that as a “crime” rate, which The Star’s analysis of Toronto police data did not measure. The Star regrets the error.

There had been another one.

Soon, a police officer would face the thankless task of breaking the news to yet another anguished family. The officer would have to tell Omar Sheriff Christian’s next-of-kin that the 26-year-old was dead - shot as he stood outside an Etobicoke nightclub.

His killing, like many others in the black community, sparked a tragic chain reaction. Police allege that Christian’s friends, who knew him as ‘Face’, took off in a fury to avenge his death. But instead of finding his killer that hot July night last year, they found community activist Paul Watson, 33, and his 29-year-old friend Michael Lewis. The two were on the doorstep of a Toronto housing complex.

In the space of 24 hours, three black men lay dead; their names added to a list many have mourned.

“Look at the news, all the shootings that have happened - look at the news, “ despairs Bev Folkes of the Black Inmates and Friends Assembly. “You’re seeing black faces, black faces. I don’t want to turn the TV on.”

A Star investigation, conducted by analyzing police arrest records, showed that in certain cases where police have discretion to use personal judgment, blacks receive harsher treatment than whites. Last weekend’s stories prompted a flood of letters and phone calls from black readers who say they have been subjected to racial bias by police.

Although the Star stories did not suggest police have any official policy of racial profiling, they sparked a vigorous denial that profiling takes place.

The same analysis of a massive police database also reveals that a disproportionate number of blacks were charged with violent crimes. These include homicides, attempted murder, sex assaults, gun-related offences and assaults. These are cases where officers, due to the serious nature of the charges, have little room to exercise even a subconscious bias.

The data show that accused black people represent nearly 27 per cent of all violent charges; this, although the latest census figures show that only 8.1 per cent of the population list their skin colour as black.

“If those statistics are true, we in the community have to look at these and say: ‘Wait a minute here, what’s going on?’“ says Valarie Steele, president of the Jamaican Canadian Association.

The Toronto police database contains information on 800,000 criminal and other charges that were laid between late 1996 and early 2002 and was obtained under a Freedom of Information request. It lists skin colour in nearly 95 per cent of violent cases.

The data show that people with white skin, who the 1996 census says make up 62.7 per cent of the population, were underrepresented - accounting for 52.2 per cent of violent charges. People classified as having “brown” skin accounted for 15.9 per cent of the charges, while those in the “other” category were charged with 5 per cent of violent offences. In most cases “brown” is used to refer to people of South Asian descent while “other” mainly represents people of Chinese and other Far Eastern origin.

The relatively higher rate of arrest of blacks for violent crime saddens, but does not shock Dudley Laws of the Black Action Defence Committee.

“In light of the so-called black-on-black killings, it does not surprise me... We are very, very disturbed by what we are seeing among our young people.”

Only arrests are recorded in the database. It does not reveal whether a person was acquitted, found guilty or had charges reduced or withdrawn. The police force’s internal Criminal Information Processing System also doesn’t identify second-generation members of any immigrant community.

It does, however, indicate first generation.

The numbers show that 48.6 per cent of charges in violent crime cases are laid against people born in Canada. The second largest category is made up of residents identified as being born in Jamaica.

Those residents are listed in 12,777 charges, or 9.5 per cent of total cases for violent offences. Census data indicates Jamaican-born residents comprise 2.4 per cent of the population. While instances where blacks have been mistakenly identified by police as Jamaican-born have occurred, it is highly unlikely such errors could account for the large discrepancy.

“This part is not good. We have to look in the mirror, too, “ says Steele.

Although community leaders have long complained that young black men are sometimes “singled out” and discriminated against in situations where officers have discretion, arrests classified as “violent” are different. Police officers are usually responding to an emergency situation, or 9-1-1 calls, rather than generating arrests from random stops or searches. Any potential for racial bias is limited.

“We must take responsibility for some of our actions, “ says Folkes.

The numbers illustrate why any discussion of “profiling” can be so volatile. If police know that a certain group is more likely to be involved in violent crime, it may be human nature - whether you’re an officer or not - to apply those perceptions to the wider community. Some would argue it only makes sense to pull over or investigate more people from that group.

But criminologists point out that in any ethno-racial community, only a very small proportion of people are involved in violent offences. Most people, regardless of color, are law-abiding.

Because of that, they say the practice of profiling - viewing people through a lens of suspicion based solely on their skin colour or ethnic background - is inherently wrong, even damaging.

“The dangerous thing ... is the argument that if it can be shown that blacks have a higher crime rate than whites, that it justifies profiling,” says Scot Wortley, a University of Toronto professor who has researched and published peer-reviewed academic papers on the issue.

“We know as criminologists that the vast majority of all communities are law-abiding. We also know that most pedophiles are white. Does that mean that every time there’s a case of such a crime that all white males deserve to be stereotyped, and stopped and searched?”

Focus on the suspects alone, say advocates.

“If somebody commits a crime, that person should be arrested and charged,” says Laws. “(But) a crime by somebody within the black community should not justify police action of discrimination.”

Those same advocates also acknowledge, however, that the numbers raise questions that cannot be ignored.

“No one was born violent. What are the dynamics? What’s causing these problems?” asks Steele.

It is a question, regardless of race, that criminologists have long studied and long debated. Gender, poverty, domestic violence, education, role models and a host of other factors are known to affect whether someone may become involved in deviant or criminal acts. There is, however, no tidy formula that illustrates how these interact.

Advocates for the Jamaican community in Toronto believe poverty, and lack of opportunity, top the list.

“Once people are employed and are doing well, crime generally goes down. The bottom line is our community is impoverished because people aren’t being employed,” says Steele.Jamaican Canadians are among the poorest immigrant groups in Toronto, according to an ethno-racial inequality report prepared by Michael Ornstein, director of the Institute for Social Research at York University.

That report showed Jamaican Canadians are frequently from families with many children, but with fewer adults to care for them, living in impoverished neighbourhoods.

Commissioned by the city and released in May, 2000, it also found that more than 13,000 - or nearly 65 per cent - of all Jamaican Canadian children in Toronto were living in poverty. Nearly two-thirds had single-parent families.

Only children from war-ravaged African countries and Afghanistan fared worse in terms of poverty, according to the report. (However, their arrest rates for violent charges are low, demonstrating that poverty is not the sole factor at play.)

On the job front, Jamaican Canadian men were at a significant disadvantage. Ornstein found that many were in low-skill, lower-paying positions. Only 5.7 per cent of Jamaican Canadians hold an undergraduate university degree or higher, the second- lowest percentage of all ethno-racial groups in Toronto.

The report also found the unemployment rate for Jamaican-born Canadians, at the time the report was published, was nearly twice Toronto’s overall rate of 11 per cent.

Steele says that poverty, along with feelings of helplessness, begets violence.

“Let’s talk about some impoverished communities where the children have nowhere to go. People do stupid things when they have nothing to lose. And when people feel there is no hope, they think, ‘This is what we have to do to survive.’“

In some ways, these sentiments echo concerns Star reporters heard in late September in Jamaica, in the troubled slums of Kingston.

The city’s urban poor inhabit a world far removed from the peaceful postcards of tropical beaches or hilltop hideaways. Although most of the island remains a beautiful and safe haven for tourists, the slums of west Kingston do not a postcard make. Violent crime has become, in these ghettos, wallpaper.

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“West Kingston is a very hard place. The living conditions there are terrible for some of the people,” says Francis Forbes, commissioner of the Jamaican Constabulary Force.

“It’s perhaps the only area in Jamaica I would say this about, but I doubt you could find a household that has not confronted the death of a family member or a very close friend over the past 20 years or so ... A lot of lives have been lost there.”

Though the original roots of this violence were political, when rival parties and candidates armed their supporters to create garrison communities, the causes have become both more complex and more entrenched.

The drug trade is now high on the list, but so is poverty, unemployment, hopelessness and a distrust of police. There is also a pervasive sense among those in Kingston’s impoverished parts of town that they are trapped - and have somehow been excluded from the wider society.

It is, despite Jamaica’s multicultural motto “Out of Many, One People,” a segregated city.

“When it comes to divisiveness in the society, what race does in Canada, class and politics do here,” says Annmarie Barnes, a University of Toronto graduate student who is completing her criminology Ph.D. thesis in her native Kingston.

Barnes argues that young black men - whether from the inner cities of Kingston or Toronto - have the odds stacked against them. And that, she says, contributes to their participation in crime.

She also rejects, vehemently, the notion there is something inherently cultural that links Jamaicans with violence.

“The geo-cultural explanation for criminality ... I say that’s just as potentially damaging as the biological explanations offered by Philippe Rushton and others of that ilk,” she says. (Rushton is a professor who espouses controversial theories linking violence with biology and race.)

Some, however, do see bilateral connections. It has been suggested in Jamaica, for example, that deportees with criminal records, especially violent offenders from the United States and the United Kingdom (and to a lesser extent Canada), could be contributing to the island’s high rates of crime.

“Some people are exporting their own crime problems,” said Peter Phillips, Jamaica’s minister of national security and justice.

The argument has a controversial flip-side: that some of the Jamaican-born residents have already been predisposed to factors that influence criminality prior to arriving in Canada.

“You’d have to be mad to leave violence (in Jamaica) to become violent,” says Valarie Steele. “If you were violent before, why the hell would you come here to be violent?”

The only direct connection, says Steele and other Jamaican Canadian leaders, lies in the hands of a small number of high-level drug dealers who have immigrated with the express purpose of continuing the business. Such criminal connections, Steele says, could be found in small numbers in virtually all new Canadian communities.

The true roots of the violence, say some, run much deeper. And are vastly more difficult to fix.

“Everybody has low expectations of black youths. Only zebra mussels have lower social status than the black male youth,” says Lennox Farrell, an educator and black community leader.

“It’s not drug-related, it’s hatred-related. Until the police and until society address thoughts of hatred among these youths, they’ll continue to kill themselves and continue to be stereotyped. Some black youths will tell you every day that they walk into an ambush, that’s how they feel,” he says.

Julia Farquharson would agree. Part of a mother’s group called UMOVE (United Mothers Opposing Violence Everywhere), she’s seen one black youth after another come into her home, seething with anger and helplessness. They come to console her and offer comforting words over the murder of her son Segun, who was killed at 24. But it is often Farquharson who provides the comfort.

She reassures Segun’s friends, telling them that although police haven’t made an arrest in the homicide, they’re working on the case. She encourages them to go to church rather than take their anger to the street.

“You know, it’s interesting how grief counsellors will descend on a school when someone has been killed in certain cases, but no one looks after the community,” she says. “These children are traumatized from what they see and they need help.”

Each of those experiences, she says, acts as a pebble sending wider ripples through the community. And, some allege, police toss their own pebbles.

“For African Canadian youth in Ontario today, their first rite of passage from childhood to manhood, and usually acquired by their 16th birthday, is a ticket for trespassing in malls where we, their parents, shop,” says Farrell.

If young black males feel officers treat them unfairly, they may develop a disrespect for the law. And that disrespect can in itself contribute to crime or conflict with police.

“Our bottom line is that we’re going to have damaged young people who are going to grow up into damaged adults. If we have a number of kids who are running around fearing police and if they don’t respect police, they won’t respect themselves,” says Brian Kersey, a civil rights advocate in Windsor.

Advocates also argue that over-policing of black youths leads to a disproportionate representation in the courts and jails. That, they say, starts a progressive spiral that is difficult to halt: a criminal record, limited employment opportunities, poverty, alienation. And, ultimately, more crime.

But they also admit that the problems are not all external.

There are much wider systemic issues, they say - including issues that blacks themselves must examine.

“Everything that has happened to us is not the police’s doing,” says Folkes, of the Black Inmates and Friends Assembly.

“Something happened. Something went wrong many, many years ago and continues to go wrong.”