Seven years have passed since a Toronto Star investigation into race, policing and crime in Canada’s largest city was met with denials of racial bias. Today, police across the country readily acknowledge bias is a factor in police decision-making, and the Toronto Police Service is setting an example for other services and institutions with its diversity policy. Yet race still matters. Today, using never-before-released data, the Star launches a series highlighting the Toronto police practice of documenting people in mostly non-criminal encounters. In an uneasy trade-off for safer streets, people — both “good” and “bad” — end up in a growing internal database, and it is young black men, more than any other group, who are most likely to be stopped and documented.

Black people across Toronto are three times more likely to be stopped and documented by police than white people, a Star investigation has found.

To a lesser extent, the same is true for people described by police as having “brown” skin, according to a Star analysis of 1.7 million contact cards filled out by Toronto police officers between 2003 and 2008.

Top brass, including Chief Bill Blair, stress that they are deploying officers in areas of high “victimization” where there is lack of opportunity and people are struggling with poverty, and where there also happen to be significant ethnic populations. They say being carded does not mean you have a criminal record.

Yet young men interviewed by the Star who have been stopped and questioned feel as though they do have one, and complain of racial bias and repeated encounters in which they believed they had no choice but to cooperate, produce identification and sometimes be searched.

The Toronto Police Service encourages officers to fill out the notebook-sized cards, known as 208s, though that is not mandatory. It is obligatory for police to fill out cards in England and a growing number of U.S. cities, but there the data is used to look for patterns of potential bias.

Here, the cards are an investigative tool. They document name, age, gender, race, skin colour, address, physical features and the names of associates. Also noted is the nature of the police contact, which includes “suspicious activity,” “general investigation” or “loitering” — nothing necessarily criminal.

People don’t have to answer questions, but legal experts say failure to cooperate can arouse suspicion.

All of this information is fed into a database that police say is an invaluable investigative tool allowing them to find associates, witnesses and suspects in crimes that have not yet been committed.

There’s collateral damage: An innocent black man like Toronto teacher Rohan Robinson is frequently stopped by police in the same way that Mark Cain, a recently convicted killer, was often stopped. With the help of a 208 card, homicide detectives broke Cain’s alibi in a 2006 case involving the murder of a community activist.

Toronto police Chief Bill Blair said he does not dispute the Star’s analysis and acknowledges racial bias plays a part in the disparities identified. How much is difficult to say.

“We’re not trying to make any excuses for this. We recognize that bias in police decision-making is a big, big issue for us, and so we’re working really hard on it.”

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Blacks are likely to be documented more than whites in almost every part of Toronto, with the most disproportionate carding of blacks in areas that are predominantly affluent and white, such as pockets of North Toronto. A criminologist calls this the “out of place” factor — people being questioned because they do not fit in.

The Race Matters series continues in Saturday's Toronto Star and online at thestar.com