By Gerald V. Paul

A new report published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, issued on Wednesday, noted that the majority of Canadian police forces are covering up crime statistics by refusing to provide information about the race of people they come into contact with.

And withholding the information makes police less accountable and makes it more difficult for researchers to study how race may influence policing, the report suggests.

According to the two Ontario criminologists Paul Millar, a Nippissing University criminal justice professor, who coordinated the study with Akwasi Owusu-Bempath, a Doctorial candidate at the University of Toronto Centre for Criminology, only a minority of police agencies - 20 per cent – have policies restricting them from releasing the data, but nearly 60 per cent suppress it anyway.

Getting to the heart of that issue is important given what’s already known about blacks being stopped more often by police and Aboriginal people being over-represented in jails, they say.

“There’s no reason we should not use every tool possible to make police more even-handed in dealings with the public. Our society is becoming more diverse, not less,” Millar told The Camera.

Millar and Bempah relied on Freedom of Information legislation to review information provided by 94 police forces to Statistics Canada through uniform crime reporting surveys to come to their conclusions.

Police representatives have input into what information gets collected, Bempah said. Deputy ministers of justice also have a say.

Twenty years ago, when a decision was made not to collect race-based data, there was simply no appetite among the ministers for doing so.

However, in two decades, race-based crime data has gone from being a taboo subject, labelled by former police chair Susan Eng as an affront to notions of equality, to what some see as a necessary tool in fighting racism.