Carleton’s Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) held a panel discussion on the issues of racial profiling in Canada and the United States on Nov. 14.
The event was organized by Jeffrey Monaghan, assistant professor in the ICCJ, who said police profiling is an important and relevant topic.
“We are moving to data-based profiling, and this leads to both racial and legal problems, and it is important to understand the implications,” Monaghan said.
Anthony Morgan, a social justice lawyer, said racial profiling is driven by racial stereotypes.
Morgan outlined very specific problems relating to the issue of identifying police profiling.
“The courts have identified that you will almost never find direct evidence, so what you have to do is you have to rely on circumstantial evidence and you have to draw reasonable inferences from that information that comes forward.”
Morgan then explored some of the ways to begin attaining the circumstantial evidence.
“It has to do with the nature of the police officers work who engage the stops, if a narcotics officer is giving out tickets that’s highly suspect [for racial profiling] because that is not their role,” Morgan said.
“In this conversation we are having about profiling, we are not talking about ‘bad apples’, you will hear often police officers, and defenders of police, politicians, say ‘oh we just have an issue of a few bad apples one or two bad officers who are spoiling the bunch’,” he added. “But we’re not talking about a few bad apples, we are talking about a systemic problem, racism in our criminal justice system.”
Morgan said the criminal justice system has to find courage to fight systemic racism as a community.
Monia Mazigh, the wife of Maher Arar, a Syrian Canadian citizen held without charges by the United States in 2002 and deported to Syria, said she had personal experience with police profiling against her husband.
“Without the proper changes to legislation, the system will indeed just revolve in a circle,” Mazigh said. “There needs to be a creation of a committee of parliamentarians to fix issues of national security. We need to be having checks on our policing in order to hold our law enforcement accountable for their actions.”
According to Mazigh, it is important to keep legal enforcement in check.
“Anti-terrorism tactics are being used to target some groups in particular,” she said. “The RCMP and [Canadian Security Intelligence Service] used encounters and surveillance to profile my husband, as well as other people, in order to write files and share them with the United States, who arrested him.”
