The majority of Canadian police forces are “whitewashing” crime statistics by refusing to provide information about the race of people they come into contact with, says a new report by two Ontario criminologists.

Only a minority of police agencies — 20 per cent — have policies restricting them from releasing the data, but nearly 60 per cent suppress it anyway, the report says.

The findings are to be published Wednesday in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society.

Withholding the information makes police less accountable and makes it more difficult for researchers to study how race may influence policing, said Paul Millar, a Nippissing University criminal justice professor, who conducted the study with Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto Centre for Criminology.

Getting to the heart of that issue is important given what’s already known about blacks being stopped more often by police and aboriginal people being overrepresented in jails, they say.

“There’s no reason we should not use every tool possible to make police more even-handed in dealings with the public,” said Millar. “Our society is becoming more diverse, not less.”

In two series in 2002 and 2010, the Star found blacks were treated more harshly and stopped more often than whites. The series analyzed Toronto Police Services data obtained through freedom of information requests.

Millar and Bempah also relied on freedom of information legislation to review information provided by 94 police forces to Statistics Canada through uniform crime reporting surveys.

Police representatives have input into what information gets collected, Bempah said.

Deputy ministers of justice also have a say. Twenty years ago, when a decision was made not to collect race-based data, there was simply “no appetite” among the ministers for doing so, said John Turner, chief of StatsCan’s policing services program.

In two decades, race-based crime data has gone from being a taboo subject, labelled by former Toronto police chair Susan Eng as an affront to notions of equality, to what some see as a necessary tool in fighting racism.