The following is an excerpt from the report Fear of Crime in Canada: Taking the Pulse of a Nation, by The Church Council on Justice and Corrections, for the Department of Justice Canada. April, 1995. The document can be found, in its entirety, on the Access to Justice Network.
"When we have fear of the unknown, we kill the unknown. That is a natural instinct."
Randall Tetlichi
Speaking to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
"Although we live together, it is not like we are living together. That is how I look at it." Chief Jonas Sangris
Speaking to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
In the wake of the celebrated Just Desserts murder in Toronto, as police searched for three black suspects of Jamaican origin, Art Lymer, president of the Metro Toronto Police Association, said: "Are we getting imported crime? If we are, let's export it as soon as possible."
Some people think controlling immigration is the answer to crime.
But Tony Doob believes otherwise.
"By saying fear of crime, we make it invisible," Doob said. " People will speak in codes here. In Toronto, it has become okay to blame crime on Jamaicans. People in their minds make a distinction between Jamaicans and blacks, legitimizing prejudice."
Is Canada importing crime? Derrick Thomas, a senior Immigration Department researcher, is the author of a report indicating that people born outside Canada are actually far less likely than native-born Canadians to commit crimes that land them in a penitentiary. "This study suggests that, so long as care is taken, these levels of immigration will not contribute to any disproportionate increase in serious crime in Canada." Foreign-born people make up 20.2 per cent of the Canadian population but represented only 11.9 per cent of those incarcerated or on conditional release in 1991. Government figures indicate that 18 of every 10,000 Caribbean-born immigrants in Canada wind up in penitentiary. Yet, in an Angus Reid Southam news poll of 1,508 Canadians taken in 1994, 51 per cent supported the view that certain racial or ethnocultural groups are more likely to be involved in crime than others.
There may well be a crime problem within the Jamaican community in Toronto and in ethnic communities elsewhere. Many of those communities' leaders acknowledge it to some extent, asking, though, that its proportion be shrunk to its realistic size, stripped of the prejudices and fears that colour the fear of crime issue.
According to Michael Petrunik and Joseph Manyoni, there is the new concern about the criminal stereotyping of visible minorities. Among the factors influencing this was the influx of "non-whites" to Canada's major cities, along with a perceived increase in certain kinds of crime as well as several prominent incidents where there have been allegations of racism on the part of the criminal justice system. Even the term "visible minority" lumps together many racial, ethnic and varying cultural groups. There are many socio-economic and generational differences among members of any one particular group, blacks included. Petrunik and Manyoni note: "Different visible minority communities may differ significantly not only in terms of types and levels of crime, but also fear of crime, attitudes to the justice system and approaches to dealing with crime."
At the core of the fear of crime problem here is the relationship of several racial groups with the police. Tim Rees acknowledged in a 1985 study that Canadian social and political institutions have not been able to respond easily and quickly to the changing multi-racial community they are meant to serve. There have been numerous cases of police and community tensions caused by specific incidents.
The police would like to keep race-crime statistics, at least partly, no doubt, to demonstrate the prevalence of crime in certain areas and within certain communities. Tony Doob acknowledged the validity of keeping those statistics for other good reasons but never to label a particular race as criminogenic. For example, race-crime statistics can be used to uncover discrimination in the treatment of people, determine what kinds of programs and personnel would be most useful, and identify groups coming into the system and highlight the need for prevention work in specific communities. But police-based official statistics do not do an adequate job of describing most crime and would not give an accurate profile of crime by a certain race.
John Lea provided an excellent description of the vicious cycle in which minority youth can get caught up, especially in their dealings with police:
| "The labelling of an ethnic group as crime-prone or even a large section of it such as young males, facilitates the adoption of general policing strategies oriented towards stopping blacks in those areas of the city with a significant black concentration, or in central shopping areas where any black youth becomes suspected of theft. The culmination of this process is a situation in which the labelling of an ethnic group as crime-prone rapidly leads to a disproportionate number of members of that group being stopped or arrested. This amplifies the original involvement of the group in crime. This magnification process, reflected in police arrest statistics, serves to act as a confirmation of police stereotypes of criminality, leading to further concentration of policing resources deployed against the group and further artificial magnification of its arrest rates. It gets compounded when youth act along the lines suggested by the explanation and/or use racism as a justification for whatever wrongdoing they commit." |
There is silent and not so silent fear of anyone different from ourselves. Fear of crime in this respect is fear of difference. We fear anyone's unpredictability. We ask: where did they come from? what will they do? Fear becomes a way of reacting to a perceived negative. There is fear of people who look, talk and act differently from the majority. Studies repeatedly show that fear is high in neighbourhoods experiencing unexpected increases in "minority" populations. Jean-Paul Brodeur commented that fear of crime and feelings of insecurity get exploited in reaction to immigration in a neighbourhood. People feel their jobs are threatened and that housing prices will drop. Lagrange has reported on the anxiety and fear of being replaced by foreigners at places of work; finding oneself unemployed gets transferred to the stereotype of immigrants who are all criminal. Delinquency becomes the point where a feeling of vulnerability to many diverse aggressions is crystalized.
As well, these fears of difference intersect with fears of victimization so that someone who is assaulted by a person from another racial group can stereotype a whole race and become afraid of them all.
Criminal justice is a high priority issue for many Canadians who feel themselves marginalized or threatened as the composition of Canada changes towards more visible minorities. A report by Stan Lipinski of the Department of Justice noted: "Urban centres are facing considerable pressure with the movement of immigrants to major Canadian centres, increasing stress on community relations and services. As society becomes more complex, there is a growing diversity of cultural communities with differing values and beliefs that is playing a role in defining that vision."
Barry Thomas, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Police Race Relations, referred to the disproportionate fears in the community compared to true risk and crime rates. What he worries about is the development of "sophisticated apartheid" in several major Canadian cities, what he defines as "apartheid without the signs". Thomas, himself an immigrant from South Africa, recognizes that some fears are quite normal; he referred to the normal consequences of a first attempt at integration for immigrants where those in Canada fear those who look and act differently. "This is a very old immigration story," he said. But where we fail as a country is in the second stage where true enculteration should happen. We haven't defined for immigrants what it is to be a Canadian. Some immigrants make it on this level. Some don't.... We have a choice. We can have a form of sophisticated apartheid as in New York, where blacks do their thing in one community and whites do theirs in another, with constant war at the border. Or we can negotiate peace now, before it's too late."
