Our analysis is based on data from the Toronto Youth Crime and Victimization Survey. This project, conducted in 2000, involves a random sample of 3,393 high school students from both the public and Catholic school systems in Toronto (see Tanner and Wortley [2002] for a detailed discussion of the sampling strategy, methodological procedures, and a copy of the survey instrument). The school boards agreed to provide us with one class period (usually 75 minutes) for the students to complete the survey. After a brief introduction, in which the students were reminded of the confidential nature of the study, respondents were asked to complete a 32-page questionnaire. Members of the research team remained in the class at all times to answer questions, control the survey environment (i.e., prevent talking), and collect the questionnaires. The survey typically took between 50 and 70 minutes to complete. Original class lists indicated that there were 4,127 students enrolled in the classes that we surveyed. Thus, we were able to achieve an impressive response rate of 82.2%.
Bivariate results
The first step in our analysis was to explore the question of whether racial minority youth are more likely to report being stopped and searched by the police than white youth. The answer to this question depends on how race is operationalized (detailed descriptions of all dependent and independent variables used in our analysis are provided in the Appendix). A great deal of Canadian research on the issue of race simplistically divides the population into two major categories: whites and visible minorities. When we use this rather crude facial classification system, our results suggest that there is very little evidence of racial bias in police stop and search practices (see Tables 1 and 2). Indeed, white students are slightly more likely to report being stopped by the police in the past two years (41%) than racial minority students (38%). Furthermore, minority students (19%) are only slightly more likely to report being searched by the police than their white counterparts (17.5%). These differences are not statistically significant.
However, our results change dramatically when we use a more detailed race variable. Tables 3 and 4 reveal that students who self-identified as black are much more likely to report being stopped and searched by the police than students from any other facial background. However, the results also reveal that white students are actually more likely to be stopped and searched than Asians, South Asians, or West Asians. (2) For example, more than half of all black respondents (51%) report having been stopped and questioned by the police on two or more occasions in the past two years, compared with 23% of white students, 13% of West Asians, 11% of Asians, and only 8% of South Asian students. Hispanic students and students from “other” facial backgrounds (a category that includes those with multiple racial identities) appear to be stopped at about the same rate as whites. Additional analysis reveals that 4 of every 10 black respondents (40%) report that they have actually been physically searched by the police in the past two years, compared with only 20% of Hispanic students, 17% of whites, 11% of West Asians, 10% of Asians, and 7% of South Asians. (3) These differences are highly significant. Clearly, the experiences of racial minority students are far from uniform. Indeed, when we combine blacks, Asians, South Asians, and West Asians into the same category, we create the illusion that racial differences in stop and search experiences do not exist. In other words, the results presented above strongly suggest that the term “visible minority” may in fact mask important racial differences in both experience and behaviour and ultimately hinder the identification of racism in Canada. We therefore use a more detailed racial classification system in the balance of our analysis.
