Jun. 9, 2005. 01:00 AM
CATHERINE PORTER"My members target unlawful behaviour. For that reason, we conduct stops," said Sean Bambrick, president of the Kingston Police Association.
"These types of (studies), at the end of the day, don't prove or disprove anything."
Bambrick was reacting to the results of a study presented two weeks ago that showed black residents of the city were three times more likely to be stopped by officers than whites.
After hearing the preliminary analysis of the data — collected by officers throughout a year and analysed by University of Toronto criminology professor Scot Wortley — Kingston Police Chief Bill Closs said it confirmed what he'd feared: racial profiling exists.
But yesterday, University of Ottawa criminology professor Ron Melchers questioned Wortley's findings.
"This study does not find nor refute racial bias in the Kingston police," said Melchers, who also worked with the Toronto Police Association in publicly criticizing the Star's award-winning study on racial profiling by Toronto police officers.
"Any differences are miniscule. They're trivial — certainly nothing that could ever be used to found a statement that racial profiling has been found in Kingston."
Melchers's main criticism focused on the slim number of black Kingston residents police reported contact with over the course of the year — 103.
That was 15 per cent of the total number of people stopped, a considerable proportion considering Kingston's black community makes up less than one per cent of the city's predominantly white population.
But that's not a large enough pool of people on which to base conclusions, Melchers said.
"The Kingston black population is very, very young, and largely composed of single people," he added.
"People of that age who are single are by far more likely to be in areas (where) they'll come into contact with police officers."
Closs said he expected this type of criticism.
Kingston police "entered this fully knowing it would criticized by members of the policing and academic communities," he said yesterday.
"But what's more interesting is what's behind the critiques — do they want to help the discussion, or do they want to shut it down?"
Closs said his force is already "moving forward" on the study's findings, with plans to host discussions among officers about specific stops that could be considered racially motivated.
"We can now talk to our officers not about deliberate, mean-spirited things, but about things that happened on the street that very well would have been unintentional or subconscious, and no other police department in Canada can do that," he said.
Closs added that the Kingston Police Services Board will take further action once Wortley presents his final report in July.
Wortley said the criticism "has a lot more to do with politics than social science."
Additional articles by Catherine Porter
Ottawa Men's Centre