Tracing the Roots of Racial Profiling: Gender Bias, Socio-Economic Factors, and Police Encounters With Black Youth in Toronto's Eglinton West
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study critically investigates the intersection of race, gender, and socio-economic status in shaping the policing experiences of Black youth in Toronto’s Eglinton West, with a specific focus on the Toronto Police Service’s 13 Division. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, this research explores how systemic biases, urban spatial politics, and institutional practices contribute to the over-policing and criminalization of Black youth in a historically Black neighbourhood undergoing rapid socio-economic transformation. Through a mixed-methods approach, including an in-depth conversation with a community worker and historical-spatial analysis of census data, this study provides insight into how enduring stereotypes of Black masculinity and the invisibilization of Black femininity produce distinct forms of state violence. These experiences are compounded by economic marginalization, racialized surveillance practices such as carding, and the erosion of community spaces due to gentrification. A comparative analysis with Jane and Finch highlights how policing dynamics and community experiences differ across historically Black neighbourhoods in Toronto. While Eglinton West has experienced significant gentrification and displacement pressures, Jane and Finch’s high-rise environment shapes distinct patterns of surveillance, social isolation, and community resilience. Contrasts in local infrastructure, social spaces, and cultural hubs reveal how the urban environment interacts with systemic biases to produce varied forms of state violence and community coping mechanisms. By situating these policing practices within broader historical and policy frameworks, the research identifies how racial profiling persists despite legal reforms and public scrutiny. Ultimately, the study offers evidence-based policy recommendations centred on equity, community empowerment, and transformative justice, highlighting the need for structural change in both policing and social investment to address the compounded vulnerabilities faced by Black youth in urban Canadian contexts.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".