The not so Great Racism in Canada Thread

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by lio45

I don't see that BLM had much effect. If anything, they're turning off people.

Every time an event happened (Montreal cops shooting dead that homeless guy with severe mental health issues who was wielding a hammer, etc.) it's been adding to the ever-increasing voices demanding cops be given some mandatory social work training... which, IIRC, became a reality in many police depts before BLM was on anyone's radar (or even, before BLM was even born; not sure exactly when it began).

It's weird to think that it must be "B"LM that can fix the issue of white Montreal cops needlessly killing a mentally ill white homeless Montrealer. What a strange foreign import.

BLM isn’t relevant to and can’t solve all the problems so therefore it has no real effect.

What an impossible quagmire you have created, to guarantee that your original hypothesis remains intact.

I could state again that BLM has dramatically shifted public opinion, reposting the stats, but to what effect? Your mind is not actually open.

[savevp]

I would say, if I might, that the killing of George Floyd brought the issue of policing to renewed public attention. BLM may be the best-organised group involved in the protests surrounding that, but they weren't the reason policing is in the spotlight. Perhaps they pushed the ball further forward in terms of public awareness, certainly in terms of the anti-Black racism narrative that almost certainly applies in the States. At the same time, though, they've made it controversial with the in-your-face 'defund' protests. We're now seeing backlash against BLM as they advocate for stronger, more extreme actions - or individuals loosely associated with the movement do so. In Britain, we now see growing mainstream condemnation and distancing from BLM as the UK chapter have espoused anticapitalist ideas; mission drift if ever it existed.

So perhaps BLM have played a role in bringing the conversation around policing to greater attention, but I'd suggest they've also muddied the waters in that conversation and pushed people away, with extreme positions, from what should be a broadly palatable consensus.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by savevp

In Britain, we now see growing mainstream condemnation and distancing from BLM as the UK chapter have espoused anticapitalist ideas; mission drift if ever it existed.

UK police officers killed 3 people in 2019, out of a population of about 66 million.

1 UK police officer has died since 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officers_killed_in_the_line_of_duty

This is interesting for a few reasons:

1) The UK has a lot more people than Canada does but police killings are considerably less frequent there. It seems hard to believe that the behaviour of criminals or the public are all that's different (e.g. Canadians generate 10x more truly unavoidable fatal interactions with police).
2) It's not just a case where UK police are sacrificing themselves in the process of hesitating to use force against criminals. Police involved in fatal interactions will often say they had no alternative but to kill or assume a high risk of death.
3) The UK still has a BLM movement even though during many years the number of black people killed by police there is 0. I don't know much about it or how it differs from the Canadian or American variants. The narrative in the media seems similar (example).

[savevp]

Originally Posted by someone123

1) The UK has a lot more people than Canada does but police killings are considerably less frequent there. It seems hard to believe that the behaviour of criminals or the public are all that's different (e.g. Canadians generate 10x more truly unavoidable fatal interactions with police).

It is quite plain to see how outcomes differ when police officers generally don't carry 🞵🞵🞵🞵. Big caveat though, the UK doesn't border the US and police generally don't have to worry about criminals being armed. If Canadian police were to do widely away with sidearms, they'd be asymetrically vulnerable when confronting criminals, many of whom have legal or illegal 🞵🞵🞵🞵.

But, for every time a Canadian police officer shoots someone wielding a knife, British police probably go through that twice over, with better results.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

What an impossible quagmire you have created, to guarantee that your original hypothesis remains intact.

I could state again that BLM has dramatically shifted public opinion, reposting the stats, but to what effect? Your mind is not actually open.

Which stats? The ones that were posted a while ago that said 75% of Canadians don't think racism is a problem? What a dramatic shift of public opinion! Everyone knows the first step in actually fixing a problem is to have 75% of people believe it's not a problem. (Imagine how well we'd be currently doing on the climate front if only we had 75% of the population believing anthropogenic climate change is BS!)

[dreambrother808]

Black people may not be dying at the hands of police but unsurprisingly racism is an issue in the UK.

There are two main sorts of direct evidence that show racism and racial injustice continue in Britain – surveys about British people’s beliefs and field experiments testing whether minorities receive equal treatment in practice.

We asked whether interviewees agreed that “some races or ethnic groups are born less intelligent than others” and found that 18% of the British public agreed with the statement. We also asked whether “some races or ethnic groups are born harder working than others”, to which a substantially larger percentage – 44% – said yes.

To investigate discrimination in the job market, researchers typically send matched written applications from fictitious minority and majority-group applicants to advertised vacancies. The applications are identical in all respects and differ only in the names of the applicants, which are selected to be typical British or minority names respectively. Field experiments like these are generally recognised as the “gold standard” for determining whether minorities are at risk of discrimination.

In 2016 and 2017 we carried out a study along these lines. We found that applicants with typically black or Muslim names were much less likely than those with standard British names to receive a positive response from employers. For every ten positive replies that the British applicant (James or Emily) received, a person with a recognisably African (Akintunde or Adeola) or Pakistani name (Tariq or Yasmin) received only six. Minorities with a west European name (Guillaume, for example) were only slightly less likely than the British to obtain a positive callback.

In 2018 The Guardian newspaper conducted a similar field experiment in the private flatshare market. Expressions of interest were sent from “Muhammad” and “David” to almost 1,000 online advertisements for rooms across the UK. The Guardian found that for every 10 positive replies that David received, Muhammad received only eight.

So, government data and field experiments provide pretty conclusive evidence that black and Muslim minorities are at risk of discrimination when looking for a job or home in the UK. They only study the outcome rather than the motivations of the employer or landlord so we can’t be sure that they are acting on racist beliefs – but in law it is the outcome that matters. Unequal treatment of applicants is illegal, whatever the motivation.

Rigorous field experiments have not, to our knowledge, been conducted in the criminal justice system but we certainly cannot rule out the possibility that racial stereotyping is behind the disparities in stop and search data recorded by the government.

https://theconversation.com/how-racist-is-britain-today-what-the-evidence-tells-us-141657

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by lio45

Which stats? The ones that were posted a while ago that said 75% of Canadians don't think racism is a problem? What a dramatic shift of public opinion! Everyone knows the first step in actually fixing a problem is to have 75% of people believe it's not a problem. (Imagine how well we'd be currently doing on the climate front if only we had 75% of the population believing anthropogenic climate change is BS!)

Over the last two weeks, support for Black Lives Matter increased by nearly as much as it had over the previous two years, according to data from Civiqs, an online survey research firm. By a 28-point margin, Civiqs finds that a majority of American voters support the movement, up from a 17-point margin before the most recent wave of protests began.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html

As protests over the death of George Floyd continue across the globe, here at home a new poll has found that most Canadians feel prejudice against visible minorities in our country is a “serious problem.”

In this poll, which was conducted by Dart and Maru/Blue, 69 per cent of respondents said prejudice is a “serious problem.” On the other spectrum, 31 per cent said they didn’t see it as a critical problem — with four per cent saying it isn’t a problem at all. This view was found more often in British Columbia and Quebec.

https://edmonton.citynews.ca/2020/06/05/prejudice-poll-canada/

[someone123]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

Black people may not be dying at the hands of police but unsurprisingly racism is an issue in the UK.

I agree that racism also exists in the UK, and I'd guess that it's fairly similar to Canada (but I'm open to evidence that it's different). This is more problematic for the theory of racially-driven police killings in Canada than it would be if the UK were a racism-free paradise.

Canada and the UK are pretty similar societies. So it is odd to argue that a phenomenon exists in both (racism), causes another effect (police-involved deaths), yet the effect is 10x more prevalent in one country than the other.

I tend to agree that the cause of the deaths likely has more to do with the use of firearms than anything else.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

I have to tell you that your lens on race, like your lens on our First Nations, strikes me as wanting to permanently entrench white supremacy more than anything else. First, address the inequalties THEN advocate for the status quo.

No reactions to the strong insinuation that lio45 is an advocate for white supremacy?

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by someone123

This is much more problematic for the idea of racially-driven police killings in Canada than it would be if the UK were a racism-free paradise.

Canada and the UK are pretty similar societies. So it is odd to argue that a phenomenon exists in both (racism), causes another effect (police-involved deaths), yet the effect is 10x more prevalent in one country than the other.

I tend to agree that the cause of the deaths likely has more to do with the use of firearms than anything else.

The conclusions you’re drawing have no basis because of the lack of firearms. There is no relevant data point to compare in terms of police murders by race, whether they be Black or a non-existent, comparable Indigenous population. You are seeing what you want to see.

I don’t think that the UK and Canada are as similar as you suggest. I believe that the UK is actually more racist in many ways, but that is just an observational opinion.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

The conclusions you’re drawing have no basis because of the lack of firearms. There is no relevant data point to compare in terms of police murders by race, whether they be Black or a non-existent, comparable Indigenous population. You are seeing what you want to see.

I don’t think that the UK and Canada are as similar as you suggest. I believe that the UK is actually more racist in many ways, but that is just an observational opinion.

I don't think you understand the argument. The data you say is missing doesn't matter to the logic.

The rate of killings by police in the UK is roughly 0. The probability of a random person being killed by police in the UK is very low. The racial breakdown therefore isn't very important (but actually you can check the individual cases because there are so few). If Canada were to drop its rate of police killings to that of the UK, we could not have a large number of police involved killings of people of any race. If the UK is racist then anti-racism is probably not the key ingredient behind their comparatively low rate of police-involved deaths.

(This is just a comment on police-involved deaths, which are an important issue, and disproportionately affect some minority groups. It's not an attempt to prove that systemic racism does or doesn't exist. No subliminal message is intended.)

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by savevp

It is quite plain to see how outcomes differ when police officers generally don't carry 🞵🞵🞵🞵. Big caveat though, the UK doesn't border the US and police generally don't have to worry about criminals being armed. If Canadian police were to do widely away with sidearms, they'd be asymetrically vulnerable when confronting criminals, many of whom have legal or illegal 🞵🞵🞵🞵.

But, for every time a Canadian police officer shoots someone wielding a knife, British police probably go through that twice over, with better results.

It is quite rare in Canada. There were 5 fatal shootings in 2019, and one was the ERT during a hostage rescue.

The other three had the elements we have been discussing, one was Sudanese, two indigenous, mental health issues played a role in several of the incidents, the suspects had weapons of questionable lethality.

Four is still too many and steps should be taken to reduce this number, but it is out of hundreds of thousands of interactions with police every year. It is also unclear whether sending an unarmed social worker into these situations would have yielded a better result.

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by someone123

I don't think you understand the argument. The data you say is missing doesn't matter to the logic.

The rate of killings by police in the UK is roughly 0. The probability of a random person being killed by police in the UK is very low. The racial breakdown therefore isn't very important (but actually you can check the individual cases because there are so few). If Canada were to drop its rate of police killings to that of the UK, we could not have a large number of police involved killings of people of any race.

Yes, but handguns aren’t going to magically disappear here and so we have this issue of police killings with much higher rates for BIPoC.

Theoretically, if there were no Black people here the rate for them would be zero.

Those arguments don’t prove anything about our actual reality, unless you think that banning all handguns, including those of the police is a practical solution.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by acottawa

The other three had the elements we have been discussing, one was Sudanese, two indigenous, mental health issues played a role in several of the incidents, the suspects had weapons of questionable lethality.

Yeah, I'm trying to square this idea of ubiquitous handguns with the reality of most of the police-involved killings I hear about in Canada, as well as the low incidence of police deaths in Canada (that's old data, averaged 2 per year from 2001-2009). Police don't crack the top 10 list of deadliest profession in Canada; driving a truck is more dangerous.

Chantel Moore was armed with a knife and police decided to check up on her; they decided how to engage.

Sammy Yatim was armed with a knife. Robert Dziekanski was wielding a stapler at one point before eventually being killed by simultaneous double tasing at YVR.

The CBC data set has a breakdown by "armed" and "unarmed" but they include Dziekanski in the "armed" category. It would be interesting to see how many killed by police had a 🞵🞵🞵. About 1/4 were completely unarmed and that means not even picking up a stapler.

[LakeLocker]

Originally Posted by someone123

Police don't crack the top 10 list of deadliest profession in Canada; driving a truck is more dangerous.
.

Nonsensical stat. It's the exposure to potential threat that makes policing so stressful. This is like comparing 🞵🞵🞵 to 🞵🞵🞵🞵. A trucker can pull off the road any time they wish, this isn't an option for a cop.

Like seriously did halifax not just happen?

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Acajack

No reactions to the strong insinuation that lio45 is an advocate for white supremacy?

I guess not. And then people deny that allegations of racism are thrown around casually these days.

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I guess not. And then people deny that allegations of racism are thrown around casually these days.

How else can one interpret ideas that would permanently lock in the racial underclasses?

[someone123]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

How else can one interpret ideas that would permanently lock in the racial underclasses?

What is your evidence that race-aware policies are required to free whoever is in a racial underclass now? Who do you think is the underclass, and what would convince you that they've left the underclass?

This is an area where I thought Thomas Sowell's arguments were pretty interesting. He looks at not only at recent decades but farther back to the first half of the 20th century and then even farther to the Civil War. There isn't much historical correlation between interventionist social policies and good outcomes for African Americans. The best period of progress for African Americans was the 1940-1960 period, when the poverty rate dropped by 40 percentage points. Many people keep talking as if we need to start in on progressive social policies today but we are really talking about doubling down on a path that has been followed for 50 years.

He also points out that a lot of African Americans are today moving back to the Southern US, to places like Atlanta, where they find more economic opportunity than in the expensive and economically stratified (and progressive) coastal cities. This is missing from the way a lot of people think about the issue. Maybe economic opportunity is better than ultra-expensive cities plus extra compensatory policies directed at whoever gets the sympathies of the establishment.

I don't think we should assume that racially-aware interventionist social and economic policies will produce the best outcomes for minorities, and that anybody who thinks otherwise must be anti-minority.

[Hecate]

Originally Posted by LakeLocker

Nonsensical stat. It's the exposure to potential threat that makes policing so stressful. This is like comparing 🞵🞵🞵 to 🞵🞵🞵🞵. A trucker can pull off the road any time they wish, this isn't an option for a cop.

Like seriously did halifax not just happen?

Just imagine the stress low paid convenience store clerks are under, they’re more likely to have a 🞵🞵🞵 or a knife pulled on them than a cop, they’re more likely to die on the job, and they get the added bonus cleaning 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 bathrooms and financial stress... heroes I say. A cop can walk off the job any time they wish.... can’t handle the heat stay out the kitchen.

[ssiguy]

Let's be serious kids, this conversation is relatively pointless for the fundamental reason that we can't even agree on what is and is not racism. Much of the discrimination that we ALL suffer from is not racism but cultural, ethnic, sexist, homophobic, colourist, religious, physical and intellectual disabilities, and socio-economic. They breed and build upon one another and never work nor survive in isolation.

Attacking racism is a positive step but in order to rid ourselves of it we must rid ourselves of all forms of discrimination and under our current socio-economic system that is never going to happen.