Racial tension. (The Immigrant Experience--Profiling).

Much of the crime among immigrants is linked to poverty.

Bloody Sunday happened in Toronto in late October 2002. In the early hours of the morning, four young men were shot to death in the city and five others were injured. All the victims were black, as were all but one of the suspects.

Violent, black-on-black crime has become a serious problem in Toronto, and most of it can be traced to one group within the African-Canadian community.

Shortly before Bloody Sunday, The Toronto Star published a major investigative report on black crime in the city. A team of reporters went over the Toronto police database. This contains information on 800,000 criminal and other charges that were laid between late 1996 and early 2002; it lists skin colour in nearly 95% of violent cases.

"The data show," wrote The Star, "that accused black people represent nearly 27% of all violent charges; this, although the latest census figures show that only 8.1% of the population list their skin colour as black."

While black people are over-represented in violent crime statistics, those with white skins are under-represented. They account for almost 63% of the Toronto population, but just over 52% of the charges laid in violent crimes. Bundle all those numbers together and it turns out that slightly more than half the charges ill violent crime cases are laid against immigrants. Keep in mind that 43% of Toronto's population was born outside Canada, so the imbalance is not as large as it appears at first, However, there is one community of immigrants that does exhibit a huge imbalance.

People who were born in Jamaica are listed in 12,777 charges, or 9.5% of total cases of violent offences. Census data indicates Jamaican-born residents comprise only 2.4% of Toronto's population. Sociologists, criminologists, and others "ists" have long studied the problem, but there is no tidy, one-size-fits-all cause, although poverty is a major culprit.

Jamaican-Canadians are among the poorest immigrant groups in Toronto. That was the finding of a York University study released in May 2000. It also found that more than 13,000--or nearly 65%--of all Jamaican-Canadian children in Toronto were living in poverty. Nearly two-thirds had single-parent families, almost always with the father being absent. A lot of this dysfunction springs from Jamaican society, where there is a lot of poverty, drugs, gangs, and violence.

York University professor Desmond Ellis has studied the problem, which he says is part of a complex social phenomenon known as "stateless location." Individuals do not accept the recognized norms of behaviour and success. Young people may face peer pressure to change if they start to "act white" by studying and trying to get ahead in the white world.

Instead, street values become all-important. Status is obtained through the use of force. Violence is the accepted way of settling disputes, and the highest position is accorded to those who are the most brutal. Take the case of a young man who went by the street name of "Heavy D." At the time of writing, his real identity was not known to authorities. But, he arrived in Toronto from Jamaica sometime in 2001, and lived under a stolen identity. The word on the street was that Heavy D was involved in two of the Bloody Sunday killings. Three weeks later, Heavy D went down after stopping several of the 20 bullets that were fired at him by several unidentified black males.

It looks as though a score has been settled. But, another shootout may be needed to avenge Heavy D's death. And, so on.

One well-known criminal lawyer was interviewed about the black-on-black crime epidemic by The Globe and Mail. The newspaper did not identify the lawyer who said, "This is a violent culture. Canada inherited Jamaica's crime problem." The lawyer added that: "I would put this situation down to poverty, neglected children, and a lack of role models. There are a lot of young guys out there who need a better role model than Tupac Shakur [the gangsta-rap star who was murdered in 1996]."

However, a crucial point is often missed in all the talk about the disproportionate number of crimes committed by black people. The vast majority of African-Canadians are not involved in any sort of criminal activity.

Valarie Steele is president of the Jamaican Canadian Association. She says that, "Once people are employed and are doing well, crime generally goes down. The bottom line is our community is impoverished because people aren't being employed."

Now, is that because Jamaican-Canadians lack job skills? Is it because Jamaican-Canadians are discriminated against? Or, is there some other reason or reasons? Questions there are aplenty: answers are harder to come by.

In the past, it has been the fashion to blame everything on the oppression of black people by mainstream society. However, some black community leaders are beginning to suggest some of the problems may come from within.

In a perfect world no one notices the colour of someone's skin. But, this is not a perfect world. Police officers who frequently attend crime scenes where there are people born in Jamaica and never have professional contact with someone born in say Latvia are going to draw conclusions. And, one of the conclusions they draw is to watch Jamaicans more closely than Latvians.

RACIAL PROFILING 

A newspaper investigation in October 2002 found convincing evidence of racial discrimination within Toronto's police force. Many hot denials later an inquiry was set up to look into the allegations. But, there have been inquiries before and they've mostly uncovered the same thing. There is no official policy of racial discrimination within the Toronto or other police forces, but unofficially it happens all the time.

Police officers know that violent crime occurs more among young, black males than among other groups. The problem occurs when they apply that knowledge to the wider group, and leap to the assumption that all black people are more likely to be criminals than anyone else. That's racial profiling and it's a no-no. However, any young, African-Canadian man knows the crime of "DWB"--driving while black. Young, black men at the wheel of a car are pulled over by police out of all proportion to their numbers in the community. Black people are far more likely than whites to be taken to a police station for questioning, and are less likely to be granted bail if arrested.

Some people argue that it only makes sense to pull over or investigate more people from a group that's known to be more crime-prone than others. Critics say the practice of profiling--viewing people through a lens of suspicion based solely on their skin colour or ethnic background--is inherently wrong, even damaging.

A LONG HISTORY

While Canada is often praised for its compassion and generosity in accepting immigrants, it has a darker past. At the beginning of the 20th century, Black farmers in Oklahoma expressed an interest in moving to Canada. They wanted to flee increased racism at home. A number of boards of trade and the Edmonton Municipal Council called on Ottawa to prevent Black immigration.

In 1911, an Order in Council was drafted prohibiting the landing of "any immigrant belonging to the Negro race, which race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada."

The order was never proclaimed, but the movement of black people from the United States was nevertheless effectively stopped by agents hired by the Canadian government. These agents held public meetings in Oklahoma to discourage people from coming to Canada. They spoke about "strict interpretation" of medical and character examinations. Of more than one million Americans estimated to have settled in Canada between 1896 and 1911, fewer than 1,000 were of African descent.

Websites

African Canadian Online--http://www.yorku.ca/
aconline/index.html.

Jamaican Canadian Association--http://www.jcassoc.
com/

Urban Alliance on Race Relations--http://www.uarr.
org/index1.html