Toronto Police Accountability Bulletin No. 45, February 9, 2009.

This Bulletin is published by the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, a group of individuals and organizations in Toronto interested in police policies and procedures, and in making police more accountable to the community they are committed to serving. Our website is http://www.tpac.ca***

In this issue:

1. Making police data public
2. Policing Toronto subways
3. The release of non-crime information
4. Minor charges clog courts
5. Subscribe to the Bulletin***

1. Making police data public

The extraordinary series about racial profiling published in the Toronto Star in 2002 was made possible because Toronto police gave a Star reporter access to the data in police computers on arrests and stops by police for a number of years. The data had been altered so none of those arrested could be identified.

The Star articles concluded that police in Toronto practiced racial profiling. (See Bulletin No. 4, October 2003.) A few years later the Star reporter asked under the Freedom of Information Act for the latest data, but this time the Toronto Police Services Board replied it had no obligation to provide the information since to make the data anonymous, it would have to run a special computer program. Even though the Toronto Star agreed to pay the cost of running this program, the Board refused to release the information. The matter went to arbitration (the arbitrator said the information should be released), and then to the Divisional Court (which said the information should not be released - see Bulletin 40, March 2008.)

A decision by the Court of Appeal this January has said the Board must release the information. The appeal court concluded that its interpretation of the Freedom on Information Act and its regulations "strongly supports the contention that the legislature contemplated precisely the situation that has arisen in this case. In some circumstances, new computer programs will have to be developed, using the institution's available technical expertise and existing software, to produce a record from a machine readable record, with the requester being held accountable for the costs incurred in developing it. That interpretation makes good sense: far more so, in my respectful view than the one suggested by the [Toronto Police Services] Board." The case is `Toronto Police Services Board vs Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario and James Rankin [the Star reporter],' and can be found at http://www.ontariocourts.on.ca/decisions/2009/january/2009ONCA0020.pdf .

Read on...

Lots of interesting news from the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition in their latest Bulletin. Including the decision from the Court of Appeal that the Toronto Police Services Board had to release data on arrests and stops under a Freedom of Information Act request. This opens up lots of data to criminological researchers. Read the whole Bulletin. Tom

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!