Source: The Conversation – Canada
It’s been roughly six years since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a global conversation about anti-Black police violence and the excessive use of police force against Black and Indigenous communities. Around the same time, in Toronto, the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet — who fell from the balcony of an apartment while police officers were present — elicited outrage in Canada.
But police violence — shootings and beatings resulting in serious injury, and sometimes even the death of civilians — has been an ongoing issue in Canada, particularly during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The shootings of Lester Donaldson (1988), Michael Wade Lawson (1988) and Raymond Lawrence (1992), to name a few, spurred community uprisings in the form of protests and political disruptions that eventually led to the 1995 report of the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System.
More than 30 years later, however, we know police institutions continue to use force disproportionately when interacting with Black, Indigenous and other racialized residents in Ontario. Following the numbers We have information about this topic because the 2017 Ontario Anti-Racism Act requires all public institutions, such as police services, to collect and release race-based data to address systemic racism.
A 2020 report by the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre found that despite making up only about 19 per cent of Hamilton’s population, roughly 38 per cent of use-of-force incidents in the region involved at least one racialized person.
In the last five years, as a Black diaspora studies scholar, I have been working with a team of community leaders and researchers in Hamilton, including McMaster University social work associate professor Ameil Joseph, and community organizations such as the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre and the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion — to address the over-representation of Black, Indigenous and racialized populations in the use-of-force data.
Eventually, we expanded the analysis of use-of-force data to other cities and regions in Ontario. We analyzed data from the Solicitor General’s website and created a preliminary analysis of information from 17 cities and regions in Ontario.
A province-wide pattern In her book Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, abolition scholar at the University of Toronto-Scarborough Robyn Maynard explains that Black communities are associated with criminality in public spaces and interactions with police officers.
She traces this to historical slave patrols, a legacy she connects to the current deaths of Black men, women and Indigenous Peoples when interacting with police officers. We developed snapshots for Ontario cities revealing that in Thunder Bay, Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, London, Brantford, Windsor, Sault Ste.
Marie, Barrie, Guelph, Peel Region, Waterloo Region, York Region, Durham Region, Halton Region, Niagara Region and for the Ontario Provincial Police, Black, Indigenous and racialized communities are over-represented in use-of-force data while making up a small portion of the overall population.
Read more: Force is no substitute for social justice, so let’s dismantle the police In Thunder Bay, 71.9 per cent of all women and girls who had force used against them were Indigenous, as were 46.6 per cent of all individuals who had force used against them, according to the 2021 census.
The Indigenous population makes up 15 per cent of the overall population in Thunder Bay. Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people have gone missing or have been murdered in Thunder Bay for many years, with the local police service failing to solve several of these cases.
Demographic information such as age, race and gender explains the impact of use-of-force against Black, Indigenous and racialized communities. It honours the historical struggle of speaking up against police brutality and systemic racism in policing.
In Toronto, 83 per cent of all boys, 17 and younger, who had force used against them were Black or Middle Eastern. Thirty-nine per cent of use-of-force incidents involved members of the Black community, although they account for only 9.6 per cent of the overall population.
In the Durham Region, 67.2 per cent of all youth, 17 and younger, who had force used against them were Black, and yet the Black population accounts for 9.5 per cent of the overall population. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has documented these realities in the anti-Black racism by the Toronto Police Service report.
Between 2013 and 2017, a Black person in Toronto was nearly 20 times more likely than a white person to be involved in a fatal shooting by the Toronto Police Service. These disparities are systemic and widespread. In Windsor, 26.5 per cent of all individuals who had force used against them were Black, yet the Black population makes up about four per cent of the overall population.
In Ottawa, 22 per cent of all individuals who had force used against them were Black — 41.2 per cent of men aged 18 to 24 — yet the Black population accounts for 8.3 per cent of the overall population. In Hamilton, Erixon Kabera died in 2024 after Hamilton police officers responding to a call in his building fired 24 shots at him, striking him eight times.
From research to resistance With this research, we hope to provide Black and Indigenous communities with data to enhance their advocacy efforts in addressing systemic racism in policing. We also aim to educate the public on the adverse effects of police brutality in use-of-force interactions.
In July 2025, when I spoke about my findings on CBC’s Ontario Today and Superior Morning radio programs, Indigenous and Black community members called in to share harrowing experiences of their interactions with police officers.
Sharing these stories publicly is part of the continual struggle against police brutality.
It is a way of building solidarity, connecting historical struggles to current realities and making sure community members and organizations who have raised concerns about excessive use of force are central to developing interventions, solutions and paths to liberation.
Kojo Damptey ran for the Ontario New Democratic Party as a candidate in February of 2025.
Kojo Damptey received a grant from the Centre of Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto for this research project on use of force in Ontario. https://www.crimsl.utoronto.ca/news/csri-announces-support-four-projects
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/03/an-unfinished-reckoning-with-police-violence-community-data-shows-ongoing-systemic-racism/