Unequal justice: Behind the Ontario jail data and Toronto Star analysis

Ontario's Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services was quick to release adult data, but children’s ministry fought the request

The data that serve as the foundation for this look at Ontario jail populations by ethnicity was obtained through freedom of information requests by Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a University of Toronto doctoral candidate.

While the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services was quick to release adult data, the Ministry of Children and Youth Services, which oversees youth incarceration, fought the request, citing privacy concerns.

The youth ministry also argued that Owusu-Bempah ought to have made a research proposal, as opposed to an FOI. It initially said the requested ethnicity data — with the exception of aboriginal people — did not exist, and, finally, that producing it would cause hardship to the ministry.

Following a successful appeal by Owusu-Bempah and an order by the Information and Privacy Commissioner, the youth ministry released the data.

Read on...

Bradley Manning Humiliated and Abused: Why Is Exposing a War Crime More Dangerous Than Committing One?

Bradley Manning leaked cables showing officials covering up U.S. tax dollars funding child rape in Afghanistan, illegal bombings in Yemen and more -- and he's the one in jail?

NOTE: On March 20 CODEPINK and others will be traveling to the Quantico Marine Base to rally in support of Bradley Manning. You can sign the CODEPINK petition here asking President Obama to pardon Bradley Manning.

Bradley Manning is accused of humiliating the political establishment by revealing the complicity of top U.S. officials in carrying out and covering up war crimes. In return for his act of conscience, the U.S. government is holding him in abusive solitary confinement, humiliating him and trying to keep him behind bars for life.

The lesson is clear, and soldiers take note: You're better off committing a war crime than exposing one.

An Army intelligence officer stationed in Kuwait, the 23-year-old Manning - outraged at what he saw - allegedly leaked tens of thousands of State Department cables to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. These cables show U.S. officials covering up everything from U.S. tax dollars funding child rape in Afghanistan to illegal, unauthorized bombings in Yemen. Manning is also accused of leaking video evidence of U.S. pilots gunning down more than a dozen Iraqis in Baghdad, including two journalists for Reuters, and then killing a father of two who stopped to help them. The father's two young children were also severely wounded.

Read on...

Professors fight back in information war

Susan DelacourtOttawa Bureau

OTTAWA – Two University of Ottawa professors are issuing a dare to the anonymous person who’s been trying to obtain their personal information in what they suspect is an attempt at political intimidation.

Amir Attaran and Errol Mendes, vocal critics of the federal Conservative government, say they will release all the information requested – even the data that they don’t have to disclose by law – if the person making the request comes forward and identifies himself or herself.

“We don’t have anything to hide,” said Mendes, saying that he hopes this is also true of the person making the requests, which were so unusually large and beyond the scope of the law that they set off alarm bells with the university.

Read on...

Anyone care to speculate who is making these information requests? Tom

Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths

Julian Assange

WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

Read on...

A just released op-ed piece from the Australian. Tom

Julian Assange surrenders to British police on Swedish warrant

FILE - In this Oct. 23, 2010 file photo, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, attends a news conference in London. Assange turned himself in to British police Tuesday morning.

LONDON—WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange surrendered to London police Tuesday as part of a Swedish sex-crimes investigation, the latest blow to an organization that faces legal, financial and technological challenges after releasing hundreds of secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

Assange was due at Westminster Magistrate’s Court later Tuesday.

If he challenges his extradition to Sweden, he will likely be remanded into British custody or released on bail until another judge rules on whether to extradite him, a spokeswoman for the extradition department said on customary condition of anonymity.

Since beginning to release the diplomatic cables last week, WikiLeaks has seen its bank accounts cancelled and its websites attacked. The U.S. government has launched a criminal investigation, saying the group has jeopardized U.S. national security and diplomatic efforts around the world.

Read on...

Wikileaks and the Reactionary Impulse to Repress

By Matthew Rothschild, November 30, 2010

The single biggest Wikileaks revelation is not that the Saudis are still funding Al Qaeda, or that Hillary Clinton ordered the State Department to spy on foreign diplomats and the U.N., or that many Arab countries favor an attack on Iran.

No, the real eye-opener is the reactionary impulse of people in power to repress those who disseminate information.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the disclosure “not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community.”

Read on...

Wikileaks is doing the job the mainstream media abdicated long ago. Tom

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