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Ontario Chief Human Rights Commissioner Renu Mandhane demanded Monday that the Toronto Police Service give the commission access to its detailed race-crime statistics from Jan. 1, 2010, to June 30, 2017.

I agree with her if, as happens in the United States but is rare in Canada and Toronto, this data is made available to everyone who wants it, so we can all draw our own conclusions about what the numbers actually mean.

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As it is, we’ve been going around in circles on this issue for decades in Toronto, with the Ontario Human Rights Commission(OHRC) arguing it needs race-crime statistics to figure out ways to eliminate systemic racism against blacks by the police force.

Meanwhile, Toronto Police have long argued releasing these statistics, without proper context, could be racist in and of itself, and further damage relations between police and the black community.

In my view, keeping the data secret makes no sense — more information is better than less information when it comes to crime and policing — and refusing to disclose it increases tensions between blacks and police.