In a cramped office in the Weston-Mt. Dennis neighbourhood, this question is put to young men taking part in a program designed to keep them from the trouble that comes with gangs, guns and drugs:

Do you think police have stopped, questioned and documented every young man of colour in this neighbourhood?

To a one, the young men agree that is the case in their part of town, one of 13 designated by the city as priority districts, and one where there had been a spate of homicides. ( Scroll down for supporting graphics. )

“I am sure of it,” says Arnold Jeyabalan, 25, a case manager and employment counsellor with Prevention Intervention Toronto, the federally funded pilot project operating in this office off the lobby of an apartment building. The project closes at the end of March.

“At least once,” continues Jeyabalan, who grew up in Malvern, another of the city’s at-risk neighbourhoods, and has worked with youth in Weston-Mt. Dennis since 2007.

A Star analysis of Toronto police stop data from 2008 to mid-2011 shows that the number of young black and brown males aged 15 to 24 documented in each of the city’s 72 patrol zones is greater than the actual number of young men of colour living in those areas.

Young white males and those designated as “other” do attract police attention, but nothing as pronounced as black and brown youth.

Toronto police Chief Bill Blair dismisses the possibility that his officers, who are encouraged to stop, question and document citizens in all areas of the city as part of regular and targeted police work, may have documented all young black and brown men in certain areas.

“I can’t imagine that that’s true,” Blair said in an interview that stretched over two hours and included two deputy chiefs.

People come and go, he said, and citizens are documented in areas where they do not live, which indeed accounts for many of the cards filled out in certain neighbourhoods.

Blair pointed to internal police data that, unsurprisingly, show many of those stopped within patrol zones do not live within them. This, he argues, would account for much of the vast differences between those carded and populations in the Star comparison.

For example, in patrol zone 121, which cuts through the Weston-Mt. Dennis neighbourhood, a Star analysis found that, between 2008 and mid-2011, four times as many young black men were documented as the number census figures show actually live there.

According to a Toronto police analysis shared with the Star , 70 per cent of all of the people stopped and documented in zone 121 over that time period did not live there.

“That’s where they spend their day,” says Blair. “It may not be where they sleep. They go to those places. And we don’t do our (documenting) in people’s bedrooms.

“We do it out on street corners and we do it in front of shops and we do it in front of community centres, we do it in an apartment stairwell.”

The data do not — and cannot — prove that every young male of colour in certain areas has been stopped, questioned and documented. But they do give rise to questions.

The ratios in the Star analysis are worrisome to the chair of the body that oversees Toronto police.

“I find the data hugely problematic, regardless of what explanation is provided by the Police Service,” Alok Mukherjee, chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, wrote in an email response to Star questions.

“No explanation can provide a credible alternative reason for the significant discrepancy in the contact between the police and young people from different ethno-racial backgrounds,” wrote Mukherjee, who, along with the chief, was provided an advance copy of the Star analysis.

“Even the fact that the populations of young people from none of these backgrounds is static, and there are constant movements — visits, transient living, temporary stay-over, etc. — does not provide a satisfactory answer, though this may mitigate the ratios somewhat.”

Mukherjee intends to raise his concerns with the police board, as well as revisit a recommendation that Toronto police embark on a pilot project to look at race-based stop data.

This analysis of Toronto police data is a continuation of a groundbreaking Star investigative series published a decade ago. Following that series, the Star fought for seven years for updated police data and followed up in 2010 . This time, the Star looks at fresh data from 2008 to mid-2011.

The Star analysis shows carding of citizens is on the rise, and it takes a new look at individuals carded versus population.

On a patrol-zone level — there are 72 in Toronto — the Star looked at the ratio of individual young males, aged 15 to 24, who were documented to the actual population of young males in that age group.

Obviously, not everybody who is documented in a patrol zone lives there. Police say nearly all of the people documented in the zone that includes the Entertainment District — a place where people from all over to work and play — do not live there.

The ratios of young men documented in that area, known as zone 523, to the numbers who live there are huge, since relatively few people live in that zone to begin with. For young black males, for example, the ratio of individuals documented to the population there is 252:1. For brown young males, it is 65:1. For young white males, 23:1.

But in most zones, the traffic is less and more people live there, and the ratios drop.

For black males, the ratio for most patrol zones ranges from about 4:1 to 8:1. For brown young men, most zones have a ratio of 2:1 to 8:1. For white young men, the typical range is between 1:1 and 2:1. For those designated as “other,” most zones have a ratio of less than one to one.

Overall in Toronto, the number of carded young black men between 2008 and mi-2011 was 3.4 times higher than the young black male population. The ratio for young brown men was 1.8:1, and for white young men and those considered “other,” the ratios dropped to 1:1 and 0.3 to one, respectively.

These patterns are best seen in maps available online at thestar.com and in accompanying graphics.

Blair is quick to acknowledge that the stops and questioning don’t always go well and that young people in areas with high levels of violent crime may feel they are being targeted. But he also points to reductions in violent crime in priority neighbourhoods.

“I believe these interactions are necessary, but they have to be done in a way that mitigates any potential risk or damage that’s caused by it,” says Blair. “We use the word balance around here a lot — trying to strike that all-important balance between the work that we have to do in enforcement or in crime prevention or through this felt presence — and at the same time, I don’t want young people to feel that they’re being unfairly targeted.”

Blair created a specialized policing tactic called Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) in response to a spike in homicides in 2005, the so-called “Year of the Gun.” The strategy involves targeting violent areas with officers who stop, question and document at a higher rate than regular officers.

He has also been credited with changing the face of the force by recruiting and promoting officers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. The service also partnered with the Ontario Human Rights Commission in a novel charter project that looked at ways to deal with racial discrimination and racially biased policing.

A police youth summer job program in place since 2006 employs 150 kids aged 14 to 17 each year from at-risk neighbourhoods, chosen from a pool of 3,000 applicants. They must still be in school and pass background checks.

In many ways, Toronto is a model in terms of race relations for other police services and has been since Blair became chief in 2005.

Yet, for all that, youth workers and academics interviewed for this story worry that the balance Blair speaks of is out of whack in at-risk neighbourhoods, where there are more single-parent homes, more poverty, higher unemployment, less opportunity — and more people of colour.

On the streets, front-line community workers in Weston-Mt. Dennis use words such as “toxic” and “not good” to describe the relationship between police and young people.

The feelings are there even with younger kids who have never had a personal experience with being stopped and questioned by police.

“It’s negative because they have all these others, older siblings who have had experiences with the police, and the way the black kids in the area are policed is entirely different from other kids,” says George Martin, program manager with the Community Action Resource Centre on Keele St.

He says the police who do the stopping and documenting have a different style from those in the community squads in the area. The latter are “doing it in a very good way, it’s a good relationship with the kids,” observes Martin, who worked with children aged 7 to 12. “And the kids know them.

“However, these are not the guys who are coming after school to (stop and document) them. The guys who are coming after school have a different approach. They first see them as criminals before seeing them as anybody else.

“So, all the good work that community policing is doing gets neutralized.”

The approach has worked to take guns off the street and, to be sure, has knocked down the killings in at-risk neighbourhoods, but many regard it as overly aggressive — and a Band-Aid solution that solves none of the underlying conditions that lead to crime.

Not that that is police business, but at some point, the benefits of heavy policing come at the cost of the freedom to move without being watched, stopped and questioned.

If a community loses trust in police, police can’t do their job. And if they can’t, say experts, a community may become less safe.

Toronto police document people on forms called Field Information Reports, which include personal details including skin colour, the reason for the interaction, location and names of others — or “associates” — who were involved in the stop.

Most of these stops involve no arrest or charge, and are for reasons such as “general investigation” related to a traffic stop or for loitering. Other reasons include bail compliance checks and trespassing.

Between 2008 and mid-2011, police filled out 1.25 million of these reports, involving 788,000 individuals. Skin colour was specified on 92 per cent of the cards.

The personal details are entered into a massive police database that police say provides them valuable leads following crimes, such as names of potential witnesses and suspects.

While blacks make up 8.3 per cent of Toronto’s population, they accounted for 25 per cent of the cards filled out between 2008 and mid-2011. In each of the city’s 72 patrol zones, blacks are more likely than whites to be stopped and carded. The likelihood increases in areas that are predominantly white.

After peaking in 2007 and declining in 2008, the number of cards filled out each year has risen steadily. There were 381,873 cards filled out in 2011, 20,000 fewer than 2007 but up 18 per cent from 2008.

In an interview with the Star two years ago, Blair attributed the drop in 2008 to the possibility that police had gotten to “know” many people, and there was less need to document them. This time around, Blair says the subsequent increases are the result of intelligence-led policing in violent crime hot spots.

Yet police fill out these cards in every area of the city, and it is considered good police work. In fact, most police services collect data from non-criminal encounters they have with the public.

“When I have two cops walking down the street, I don’t want them just talking to each other,” Blair says. “I want them to talk to the people . . . the shop owners, the people who live there, that are working there, playing there, kids going to school.

“It’s that felt presence. You want them to engage with people. And one of the things we require — not every interaction with the public — is that they record a certain amount of information about those transactions. It’s a measure of them doing that.”

Youth interviewed by the Star for past stories and for this series speak of encounters with police that begin badly, such as being interrupted during a basketball game on an outdoor court and asked to produce identification.

Many feel “criminalized” by the experience and that they have no choice but to answer police questions, even if they are not required to do so.

To go silent or, worse yet, walk or run away, invites more trouble.

Aside from a few youth workers who have had their own experiences being stopped by Toronto police, the young people the Star interviewed for this story did not want to be identified, but they share similar stories.

“One thing I learned is that if you’re not involved in that stuff, then you don’t have any problems,” says one thoughtful black man of 21 living in a priority neighbourhood, referring to street crime and police.

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“But I always feel that, because I live in the neighbourhood and because I fit the profile of young black male, I guess I’m always going to be targeted.”

Like this experience he had two years ago with TAVIS officers: “We were at the basketball court and they roll up on us and say, ‘Wow, don’t move. Don’t move.’

“They searched one of them and they say, ‘Wow, what do you have in your pocket?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Don’t lie to me. Where is the stuff?’ ”

There was no “stuff.”

“It feels more like another system of oppression where the police use that power just to let you know that they have that right to come any time and your home is not your home.”

University of Windsor law professor David Tanovich has described the growing police database of people stopped and documented in these mostly non-criminal encounters as a “no-walk list” for “racialized youth.”

In a ruling in 2004, Justice Harry LaForme, now on the Ontario Court of Appeal, wondered if the practice of documenting citizens was a possible tool for racial profiling.

“This kind of daily tracking of the whereabouts of persons — including many innocent law-abiding persons — has an aspect to it that reminds me of former government regimes that I am certain all of us would prefer not to replicate,” wrote LaForme.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre of Criminology and co-author of a 2011 paper called “The usual suspects: police stop and search practices in Canada,” believes the patterns revealed in his research and in certain Toronto neighbourhoods in the Star analysis are “reminiscent of apartheid South Africa.”

Owusu-Bempah, who sits on the Toronto police Black Community Consultative Committee, said in an interview that Toronto police are working hard to improve relations with communities strained by violence and credits Chief Blair for hiring “racialized police officers.”

But then there is the reality of what is being felt and perceived by youth on the streets.

“We see hard evidence that blacks, yes, are more likely to stopped, searched and questioned, but what we’re not seeing in the data that we have are the stories that we hear of young men who are in neighbourhoods other than their own who are stopped by the police and essentially told, you know, ‘If you don’t have any legitimate business here, especially at night, you shouldn’t be in the area, and to move along.’ ”

The Star analysis of the police stop data shows blacks are more likely than whites to be documented in areas where fewer black people live.

However, the overall level of carding of citizens is highest in areas where more visible minorities live.

Owusu-Bempah says data suggesting that in some areas police may have documented every young black or brown male “speaks exactly to this being reminiscent of apartheid South Africa and the pass laws which were used there to control the movement of blacks in the country.”

Chief Blair and police board chair Mukherjee reject the apartheid comparison.

“Apartheid in South Africa was state-sanctioned and -backed practice,” Mukherjee says in an email. “Not so in Toronto, and that is a significant point of departure …

“Having said that, I would worry very much with the youth workers that even the belief that this is what is happening will undo the effect of all the positive work that has been attempted to be done.”

The belief is there in Weston-Mt. Dennis.

“I don’t think you’re getting to know someone by getting their name and their height and how much they weigh,” another young black man who lives there told the Star . “You don’t know the person. You know what they look like.”

Another explanation for the over-representation of blacks in the card data — one few wish to broach publicly — is who is responsible for street crimes.

In the same freedom-of-information request, the Star obtained Toronto police arrest and charge data that shows blacks represent 30 per cent of charges for violent offences yet comprise 8.3 per cent of the population.

This remains unchanged from past Star analyses, in 2002 and 2010.

University of Toronto criminology professor Scot Wortley believes police are using the same kind of “actuarial reasoning” with young black men that insurers often use when looking at young male drivers.

In other words, just as all young males pay higher car insurance premiums regardless of their driving record, young black males are paying a higher “policing premium” because of the criminal actions of a few.

The “higher rate of offending may be the result of family issues, racism, poverty, unemployment and other social factors,” says Wortley, who studies youth crime and policing and co-wrote the Usual Suspects article with Owusu-Bempah.

“The other side of the equation, however, is that the vast majority of young black males in Toronto are not in any way engaged in serious criminal activity.

“These law-abiding black males, unfortunately, become guilty by association . . . The police may think that it is rational and perhaps cost-efficient to stop and search all young black males.

““We have to ask ourselves, is this appropriate when it comes to the operation of the justice system?

“On the one hand this may sometimes get guns and drugs off the street. On the other hand, our research shows that these stops contribute to black males alienation from Canadian society.”

Since becoming chief in 2005, Blair has been quick to acknowledge that racial bias is a reality in policing, as it is with any other segment of society that hires from the human race.

But he has also stressed that his strategy with TAVIS is to heavily police in areas of high victimization. These areas happen to be poorer and home to more visible minorities.

“The most important statistic so far?” Blair says, nearing the end of the interview. “I think that all of those young people are safer today than they were five years ago. And I think it’s far more likely that young people can be successful and live in their neighbourhoods without being fearful.

“That’s ultimately why we’re doing this . . . It’s safer for those young people.”

Police are certainly aware of the negative perceptions.

They have consulted youth over how to improve interactions they have with young people and have tailored the TAVIS program to do maintenance and follow-up programs in areas they target.

But youth worker Jeyabalan says there is much more work to be done in at-risk areas, and it is all about the approach.

“There are bad apples in every area, but this whole community’s getting targeted,” he says. “That’s why you have people who are innocent having those feelings toward police.

“There’s a lot of good cops . . . But there definitely needs to be a change in their interactions with the youth.

“You have TAVIS . . . targeting communities like Jane and Finch, Rexdale or Malvern . . . ” Jeyabalan continues. “You don’t need five cop cars for two individuals. You’re intimidating the youth and the adults.”

Data analysis by Andrew Bailey, Hidy Ng and Jim Rankin

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