It was unprecedented access to police use-of force reports that were, until recently, kept out of the public eye.

Within the past year, the Ontario Human Rights Commission obtained documents from Ontario’s police civilian watchdog, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), offering never-before-seen information about death, serious injury and sexual assault probes involving Toronto police.

The documents were compelled as part of the commission’s ongoing inquiry into racial profiling and discrimination of the Black community by the Toronto police, and initial results were released Monday in an interim report.

What the commission found sifting through over 400 cases dating back to 2000 was “disturbing,” chief commissioner Renu Mandhane told reporters at a packed news conference Monday, including finding Black people are “grossly overrepresented” in cases of police use of force.

Below, a closer look at the data crunched by the commission and what can be learned from it.

Read more: Black people ‘grossly overrepresented,’ more likely to be hurt or killed by Toronto police, racial profiling report finds

What the human rights commission reviewed

The commission examined SIU investigations into deaths, serious injuries or allegations of sexual assault involving Toronto police officers. To do so, the commission obtained and analyzed data from two time periods: from 2000 to 2006 (187 cases) and from 2013 to 2017 (244 cases).

The review included examining SIU director’s reports — the detailed review of an investigation, including details of who was involved and what happened — which are typically accessible only by Ontario’s attorney general.

Overrepresentation in use of force

In general, the data review found that members of the Black community are “grossly overrepresented” in SIU cases of Toronto police use of force. That included finding that between 2013 and 2017, a Black person was almost 20 times more likely than a white person to be fatally shot by police, representing seven of the 10 fatal police shootings.

Accounting for approximately 8.8 per cent of Toronto’s population, Black people were involved in approximately 30 per cent of police use-of-force cases that resulted in serious injury or death and 60 per cent of deadly encounters with Toronto police.

Armed at the time

More than two-thirds of civilians (67 per cent) who were involved in police use-of force investigations between 2013 and 2017 were unarmed at the time of their encounter with Toronto police, the report found.

Generally, a higher proportion of white civilians had a weapon of some kind when police used force against them. A higher proportion of Black people had a gun or a knife during cases where a police officer used force, but a higher proportion of white people had a gun during police shootings.

Outcomes of SIU investigations

The review found that 90 per cent of SIU cases result in no charges being laid against the officers, and that is regardless of race. Between 2000 to 2006, two out of 43 use-of-force cases involving a white civilian saw charges against an officer, compared to one out of the 33 such cases involving a Black civilian.

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The statistics are similar when examining the 2013 to 2017 period, with just two of the 55 use-of-force cases involving white civilians ending in charges, and one of the 36 cases involving a Black civilian. (The commission notes, however, that the SIU did not provide access to some incidences where an officer was charged, because the case was still before the courts).

Unauthorized police stops and other police “misconduct”

According to the human rights commission, the SIU director flagged instances of police misconduct in cases where no charges were laid, but problematic behaviour was nonetheless uncovered. The included some cases where Toronto police had no legal basis for stopping or detaining a civilian at the outset of a police interaction.

It also included police conducting “inappropriate or unjustified searches” and the laying of charges “without merit,” according to the report.

Lack of police co-operation

The review uncovered that in a “significant minority” of cases, the SIU director flagged issues with police co-operation before or throughout an investigation. That includes incidences of officers not notifying the SIU of a serious injury, failing to complete notes or destroying them, refusing to answer questions, and “police attempting to access security camera footage while a SIU investigation was in progress,” according to the report.

But the SIU complaints about a lack of police co-operation were not related to the race of the civilian. For example, during the 2013 to 2017 period, the SIU found issues with police co-operation in 8.3 per cent of cases involving white civilians, compared to 9.7 per cent of investigations involving Black civilians.

Sexual assault allegations

The SIU investigates allegations of sexual assault involving police, and a review of the complainants found that Black males were “significantly overrepresented” in these probes. For example, between 2013 to 2017, Black men were 6.4 times more likely than white men to allege sexual assault by a police officer, an allegation often made in the context of a strip search or a police frisk.

During the same time period, Black women also were 1.3 times more likely than white women to allege being sexually assaulted by a Toronto police officer.

Wendy Gillis is a Toronto-based reporter covering crime and policing. Reach her by email at wgillis@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @wendygillis

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