Using the Charter to Stop Racial Profiling: The Development of an Equality-Based Conception of Arbitrary Detention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Do the police use race as a proxy for criminality, particularly, in drug cases? If so, is this a rational discriminatory practice that is based on who the usual offender is or an offensive exercise of racial prejudice? What are the consequences for those communities targeted by the police? This article investigates these questions that have gone unanswered for too long in Canada. After offering a definition of racial profiling, evidence is presented that suggests that the practice is rampant in the United States and is likely practiced by some Canadian police forces, particularly, in cities with large visible minority populations. As for its rationality, recent statistical evidence on drug use and trafficking reveals that racial profiling is a fallacy. As for its reasonableness, racial profiling has had a catastrophic impact on those communities targeted by the police. This article examines how the Charter can be used to stop this practice. Since racial profiling is exercised through the use of pretext vehicle stops and investigative detentions, the focus is on section 9 of the Charter which protects against arbitrary or discriminatory police detentions. While the seminal section 9 cases of Brown v. Durham Regional Police and R. v. Simpson provide some protection against racial profiling, issues of proof and cognitive distortion limit their effectiveness. Thus, enhanced section 9 standards need to be developed. This article looks at infusing section 9 with the equality principles animating section 15(1) of the Charter. This article is available in Osgoode Hall Law Journal: http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol40/iss2/2 USING THE CHARTER TO STOP RACIAL PROFILING: THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN EQUALITYBASED CONCEPTION OF ARBITRARY DETENTION© BY DAVID M. TANOVICH Do the police use race as a proxy for criminality, particularly, in drug cases? If so, is this a rational discriminatory practice that is based on who the usual offender is or an offensive exercise of racial prejudice? What are the consequences for those communities targeted by the police? This article investigates these questions that have gone unanswered for too long in Canada. After offering a definition of racial profiling, evidence is presented that suggests that the practice is rampant in the United States and is likely practiced by some Canadian police forces, particularly, in cities with large visible minority populations. As for its rationality, recent statistical evidence on drug use and trafficking reveals that racial profiling is a fallacy. As for its reasonableness, racial profiling has had a catastrophic impact on those communities targeted by the police. This article examines how the Charter can be used to stop this practice. Since racial profiling is exercised through the use of pretext vehicle stops and investigative detentions, the focus is on section 9 of the Charter which protects against arbitrary or discriminatory police detentions. While the seminal section 9 cases of Brown v. Durham Regional Police and R. v. Simpson provide some protection against racial profiling, issues of proof and cognitive distortion limit their effectiveness. Thus, enhanced section 9 standards need to be developed. This article looks at infusing section 9 with the equality principles animating section 15(1) of the Charer. Est-ce que la police utilise ]a race comme substitut pour ]a criminalit6, surtout dans les cas impliquant la drogue? Si oui, est-ce que ceci constitue une pratique rationnelle discriminatoire basde sur les caract~ristiques habituelles du contrevenant, ou est-ce un exercice de prejudice racial? Quelles sont les consequences pour les communautds cibldes par ]a police? Cet article examine ces questions demeur~es sans rdponse pendant trop longtemps au Canada. Apr s avoir presentd une d6finition do profilage racial, rauteur offre de la preuve qui sugg re que la pratique r~gne aux Ettats-Unis et est probablement utilisde par certaines forces policires au Canada, surtout dans les villes ob Ion retrouve des populations importantes de minorit6s visibles. Quant A sa rationalit6, les statistiques rdcentes sur I'usage et le traffic de drogue r6v~le que le profilage racial est on sophisme. Quant son caract~re raisonnable, le profilage racial a eu des impacts catastrophiques sur les communaut~s visdes par Ia police. Cet article examine comment on peut abandonner cette pratique , l'aide de la Charte. Puisque le profilage racial sert de pr~texte pour arr~ter les voitures et mener des detentions pour fins d'enqu~te, I'auteur porte attention , rarticle 9 de Ia Charte qui protege les citoyens contre les detentions arbitraires et discriminatoires. Malgr6 que les decisions Brown c. Durham Regional Police et R. c. Simpson offrent une certaine protection vis-h-vis lutilisation do profilage racial, leur efficacit6 est r6duite en raison des difficult6s de preuve et de distortion cognitive. Finalement, les standards de I'article 9 de Ia Charte ont besoin d'6tre am6lior~s. Cet article examine la possibilit6 d'infuser les principes de 1'galit6 6manant de ]'article 15(1) de la
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".