Police in Canada still disproportionately white and male, StatCan report finds

Multiple reports from the Star, including a groundbreaking investigative series in 2002, have found that Toronto police have historically disproportionately targeted and used force against Black communities. The city’s police leaders acknowledged as much in June 2022, and multiple reports have pointed to racism in policing practices.

And it’s not just how police interact with everyday Canadians. Internally, reports have shown that women in police forces have been the subject of harassment and discrimination, including one from 2022 that addressed the issue within the Toronto police.

Experts told the Star that while representation within police forces remains a problem, it distracts from the larger issue of the culture of policing, which reports have shown continues to discriminate against people of colour.

Racialized police officers a rarity

Just eight per cent of police officers across the country identified as being from a racialized group in 2023, the StatCan report found, vastly under-representing people of colour when compared to the general population. 

According to the 2021 census, 26.5 per cent of Canada’s population was part of a racialized group.

Christopher J. Williams, a research and member of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, hypothesized that if the 71,472 police officers in Canada actually represented the Canadian population, we would have nearly 19,000 police officers from racialized groups. Instead, only about 5,700 police officers are racialized.

In a breakdown by police service, 13 per cent of the RCMP were from a racialized group, seven per cent for municipal services (like the Toronto Police Service) and just two per cent within the Ontario Provincial Police.

And despite a push among police forces to diversify their hiring processes, only 13 per cent of all police recruits in Canada were from racialized groups, the report found.

These findings didn’t surprise Robyn Maynard, associate professor of Black feminisms in Canada and author of “Policing Black Lives,” but it distracts from the real issue of policing culture.

The bigger picture is “about what it means to focus on racial diversity within policing versus to focus on racial injustice,” Maynard said.

“Having racial equity within police forces does nothing to address the far more significant issue of the role that policing plays in contributing to injustice through profiling, violence and killing,” she added. 

That means avoiding “diversity for the sake of diversity,” Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a sociology professor at U of T, warned.

“Police agencies and other organizations need to be cautious about tokenistic appointments,” he said, citing research that shows simply diversifying police forces does not solve the racial disparities in policing.

Female officers still outnumbered

The report also found that, while the number of women in Canadian police services is on the rise, women only made up 23 per cent of police officers in 2023, greatly under-representing the 50.9 per cent of women that make up Canada’s population.

Police forces across North America have recently pushed for more representation of women in police forces, in an attempt to break the “old boys’ club” culture of policing.

Williams, citing the Globe and Mail’s Unfounded investigation, said that police organizations with a higher percentage of women were more likely to take sexual assault allegations seriously.

Expenditures go up, as calls for service decline

The StatCan report also found that from 2022 to 2023 police expenditures rose by a combined $19.7 billion across the country — a six per cent increase from the year prior — while, in the same period, calls for service have decreased by two per cent.

That figure, Williams said, is “another indication of the degree to which there is no linear, proportionate relationship between police spending and crime rates, crime severity indexes or any other trends that supposedly drive police-related resource allocations.”

Police budgets are heavily influenced by the “persuasive power” of police chiefs and police associations, “not the needs and wants of the general public,” he added, alluding to Toronto city hall’s recent capitulation to the city’s police association for an increase in funding following an aggressive public campaign.

The RCMP and the Ontario Provincial Police did not respond to requests for comment before publication.

The Toronto Police Service is working to improve diversity amongst its ranks, spokesperson Stephanie Sayer told the Star. The city’s police force has taken “a more holistic review of candidate files with greater focus on lived experience, and has improved data collection processes to better understand the candidate and employee experience, uncover systemic issues in our hiring practices, and identify progressive changes.”

Sayer also added that calls for service to the Toronto police have been on the rise in recent years, and continue to trend upward in 2024. 

“Beyond data collection, the Service is working equally hard on our internal environment — including our training, systems and processes, and leadership competencies — to ensure our increasingly diverse workforce is supported and can thrive,” she said.