Black and Middle Eastern people in Hamilton continue to be overrepresented in use-of-force incidents recorded by the Ontario city’s police service.
The statistics, which were submitted to the police board on Thursday, mark the fifth straight year that Black individuals are disproportionately represented.
The inclusion of race-based data started being published in 2020 as part of an Ontario government mandate, to expose any racial biases or stereotyping within police services. When force is used, police report the person’s race based on their perception of their race.
Kojo Damptey, a McMaster University sessional instructor and PhD student, and colleagues examine use-of-force data from across Ontario.
In the case of Hamilton police, community members have been expressing concern about disproportionate use of force even before police have been publishing the data, said Damptey.
“Every year, the results are the same, but we never get any changes.”
Damptey spoke to CBC Hamilton following a session last week at the David Braley Centre downtown, but before the police board meeting Thursday.
At the session June 17, Staff Sgt. Ryan Hashimoto acknowledged the history of community concerns.
“These patterns are not new and neither are the calls for action.”
In 2023, he said, “it became increasingly clear that reporting data wasn’t enough. We needed to do more with what it was that we were learning.”
Hashimoto pointed to the work of the police’s Community Advisory Panel as a step in the right direction.
The 10-member panel formed in 2024 in an effort to promote equity and address systemic racism in policing. It makes non-binding recommendations to Hamilton police, and has reviewed police data and practices such as the use-of-force training given to officers
CBC Hamilton asked police for examples of actions the service has taken as a result of learning from race-based data. In an email, spokesperson Jackie Penman said that once police have analyzed the data, they’ll “engage with the community” before eventually creating recommendations.
“When there’s a problem, there should be a list of actions,” Damptey said, adding recommendations alone — which police can choose not to implement — aren’t good enough.
Statistics based on officers’ perceptions of race
For this year’s report, police measured racial disparities in use of force against two different benchmarks: population and enforcement. (Police say 1.5 is considered a significant disparity for both.)
The population benchmark — based on how often a group shows up in use-of-force data, compared to how large that group is in the general population — is good at highlighting broad disparities, but also includes people who never come into contact with police, the service said.
Individuals perceived by officers to be Black accounted for 16 per cent of use-of-force subjects in 2024 — with Black people making up five per cent of Hamilton’s population, the disproportionality index for them is 3.2. For people who police perceived to be Middle Eastern, who make up four per cent of the city’s population, the disparity index is 2.
The enforcement benchmark compares the racial makeup of people involved in use-of-force incidents to those who were arrested or apprehended by police. By that metric, the disparity index for people perceived to be Black is 1.2; for people perceived to be Middle Eastern, it’s 1.7.
Police said people perceived to be East and Southeast Asian had a disproportionality index of 3.9 using this method, but the sample size was small, and “nearly half” the incidents occurred when police were involved in “warrant-focused enforcement projects,” which “contributed to the elevated rates of force following police contact for this group,” the report said.
Overall, police said, the enforcement benchmark allows for a more precise comparison of treatment by police.
On June 17, Natalie Stravens, co-chair of the Community Advisory Panel, spoke to the need for further analysis of use-of-force data.
“At the end of the day, we don’t know why, we don’t know how. And there’s no, ‘What now?’ that comes out of it.”
Panel member Juanita Parent cautioned that the data is based on officers’ perceptions of subjects’ races, which is an imperfect measure.
For example, she said, people in her Indigenous community are often assumed to be white and may be logged as such, skewing Indigenous representation in the data. However, Parent said, it would not be “feasible” for officers to ask someone how they identify while also trying to de-escalate a situation.
With grants from the University of Toronto, Damptey and his team at McMaster analyzed 2023 use-of-force data from the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), and forces in Barrie, Brantford, Durham Region, Guelph, Halton Region, Hamilton, London, Niagara Region, Ottawa, Peel Region, Sault St. Marie, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Waterloo Region, Windsor and York Region. The team started publishing their findings in June and will continue through July.
Consistently, Damptey has found Black, racialized and Indigenous communities overrepresented in use-of-force data, he said. For example, about 29 per cent of people the OPP used force against were Black or Indigenous. In Toronto, 33 per cent of individuals police used force against were Black males.
“Tell me how … in all these cities, Black and racialized people are overrepresented,” Damptey said. “That’s what we call systemic racism.”
General use-of-force data shows rise in 2024
Hamilton’s 2024 race-based use-of-force data was presented alongside the service’s annual use-of-force report on June 17. The two used to be part of the same report, but were separated this year due to the “complexity” of the race-based data, Penman told CBC Hamilton in an email.
There were 303 cases in which Hamilton police used force last year, the report found, a roughly 13 per cent increase compared to 265 in 2023. Overall, the rate of use-of-force incidents per 100,000 public interactions increased in 2024, from 0.12 per cent to 0.15 per cent, while the total number of use of public interactions declined year over year.
The 303 incidents involved 455 people.
“Altogether, this trend suggests that, although officers engaged in fewer interactions with the public compared to previous years, the proportion of those interactions that involved the use of force was higher,” the report said.
Police chief links more force to weapons calls
Police largely attributed this to a 39 per cent increase in weapons-related calls, from 69 in 2023 to 96 in 2024. At the information session, police Chief Frank Bergen said 2024 saw “a huge spike in shootings” compared to 2023.
The report said 310 use-of-force incidents, representing 68 per cent of cases, involved a subject that police perceived as armed. In 71 per cent of those cases, the perceived weapon was a gun.
The report does not include whether subjects were or were not actually armed.
In a letter to the police services board following the report’s release, Lyndon George, director of the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre, requested that police collect and publish data specifying what, if any, weapons that subjects have when officers use force against them.
“Without this level of detail, the public is unable to assess the proportionality and necessity of force used in each incident,” said George.
Trainer says police ‘always’ try to de-escalate
Use of force encompasses a range of actions, which include drawing or pointing a firearm or taser, physically coming into contact with a subject or firing a weapon, the report said. It notes subjects were injured in 11 per cent of cases.
“Every single police officer in every single situation we’re called to is always trying to de-escalate the situation and bring about a resolution that keeps it from getting worse,” Insp. Darren Murphy said at the June information session.
In 81 per cent of cases, the report said, police used de-escalation tactics — such as talking to the subject, or creating distance between officers and subjects — before using force.
Murphy, whose division oversees use-of-force training and who was a trainer himself, said every time an officer uses force, it’s logged and reviewed several times, first by the police service and then by the province. Generally, he said, he expects officers to draw weapons if they think subjects are armed.
Protesters marched from City Hall to the downtown police station in Hamilton on June 19. Family members spoke to the crowd after the officers who killed Erixon Kabera in November were cleared by the Special Investigations Unit.
There were eight times in 2024 when an officer fired a weapon, the report said. Of those, it noted, seven involved euthanizing injured animals.
Though the report does not name him, Erixon Kabera was the person in the other incident, involving two officers who shot and killed him in his west Hamilton apartment building in November. The police watchdog report clearing the officers was released on June 6. According to Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, Kabera was holding a replica firearm resembling a semi-automatic pistol that he pointed at officers.
After the June 17 presentation, Ameil Joseph, a social work professor at McMaster, told police it was disrespectful that Kabera’s death was referenced on the same page as euthanizing animals.
He also said community members should have been given the reports sooner to give them more time to read and formulate questions. “None of that feels like trust and respect,” he said.
On Thursday afternoon, the police board was scheduled to discuss the reports in more detail and hear delegations from several community members.
