DRIVING WHILE BLACK

CANSTATS
The purpose of CANSTATS is to point out the inaccurate use of scientific, technical, economic, or statistical information in public policy debates

The Canadian Review on Policing Research
The Canadian Review of Policing Research (CRPR) is an all-new, annual publication established to serve Canada’s policing community, including academics, researchers, and policy-makers interested in Canadian law-enforcement issues. It has been created in response to a widely recognized need for an authoritative, Canadian publication that can communicate and inform these groups about recent academic and applied-policing research developments in Canada. The Review will feature well-written summaries of recently published Canadian policing research projects, reports, and articles. It will also solicit selected state-of-the-art research reviews from Canadian policing experts on topics of special interest.
 

The African Canadian Legal Clinic Report
The ACLC is a not-for-profit organization which was officially opened in October 1994, to address systemic racism and racial discrimination in Ontario through a test case litigation strategy. In addition, a significant part of the work of the ACLC is to monitor legislative changes, regulatory, administrative and judicial developments, and to engage in advocacy and legal education aimed at eliminating racism, anti-Black racism in particular.

Data, Denials, and Confusion: The Racial Profiling Debate in Toronto
Published in Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice - Issue 45:3, 2003

Looking for the Driving While Black Phenomena
This article describes four bias mechanisms that might produce the “driving while Black” phenomena. First, some officers may be racially prejudiced and so consciously target minority drivers. Second, most officers have access to cultural stereotypes and their associated cognitive biases. This mechanism will produce a diffuse tendency to stop minority drivers at higher rates than majority drivers. This bias mechanism should be present among both minority and majority officers but operate more strongly on average for majority officers. Racial profiling, the organizational practice of stopping individuals because they “fit” a profile that includes race/ethnic characteristics, will produce racial bias in stops at very high rates among both majority and minority officers. Finally, if the police are deployed more heavily in minority communities, this will also produce high rates of minority stops. Neither organizational mechanism requires any bias in officer or organizational intent, although they will produce biased policing.

Moving Beyond "Driving While Black"

Prejudice in Police Profiling
Social science analyses of racial profiling in the context of discretionary police stops and subsequent interrogations have tended to rely on a framework dictated by federal case law, namely, they have focused on disparate impact by race as the basis for deeming profiling discriminatory. Significantly, neglected in profiling studies have been considerations of the role of prejudice. Analogizing to profiling about the sources of prejudice, activators of prejudice and legitimacy gained from acting on prejudice, among key decision makers in other institutional domains—namely, employers in the workplace and brokers/landlords in the housing market—the authors maintain that prejudice is a source of profiling. In addition, the authors discuss how identifying the prejudicial roots of profiling enhances one’s ability to both judge its propriety and understand the scope of racial prejudice in America. The authors offer suggestions for future research that sheds additional light on the link between racial prejudice and profiling.