Gigi 🍄🟫Heads up.
Another in my excessively long rants, this time about weaponizing "Reported" incidents without considering WHO reports.
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Toronto Police Service (TPS) has finally decided to get off their asses and investigate a racist incident from over a month ago.
https://www.tps.ca/media-centre/news-releases/65303/
This happened to someone I know, and I have been part of the team helping her navigate dealing with the cops since.
She was walking through The PATH, like thousands of other people do every single day, when a random racist asshole spit on her then started verbally abusing her.
First, she tried to get a screenshot of the footage showing the perpetrator's face from the security office, but they told her that they would only release footage to the police.
So after much discussion, the desire to get the images to inform other Black people in the area that this guy is out there meant that she needed to file the police report.
It only took a couple of days for the police to get the footage. We know this because they TOLD her they had it, but somehow, it took OVER A MONTH to get these stills to the public — and they would not give them to her directly.
Good luck finding the witnesses at this point, and having their recollections of the event go unchallenged in court, should it get there. 🖕🏾🖕🏾🖕🏾
This is Secondary Victimization, and TPS does it ALL THE TIME.
I don't want to say that the officer in charge (OinC) this particular case dragged his feet intentionally, but sure FEELS like it's a practice of TPS to side with the racists.
• My Lazy Ass.
I've been dancing around getting into this topic for literally years, and I guess it's time. Most recently, it was the three day old incident referenced here:
"We have literally taken up warning marginalized people not to go into 52 during his shifts, because he is such an abusive dick. I just did this again 3 days ago."
https://kolektiva.social/@Gigi/115935207575196398
Here we go.
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"Hate Crime" Statistics:
Disparities in Reporting Ease
and Unseen Barriers Skew Public
Perception of Who is Being Targeted.
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Black people in Toronto face significant barriers when attempting to report hate crimes to the Toronto Police Service (TPS), leading to chronic underreporting and a conveniently distorted picture of anti-Black hate in "official statistics."
Official reports, independent inquiries, community accounts, and statistical patterns all show that the Toronto Police Service (TPS) does not provide equally accessible or responsive pathways for reporting hate incidents across all groups.
[I would like you to note that the above incident where the TPS put out a call for witnesses HAPPENED WELL OVER A MONTH AGO. ]
While TPS maintains general reporting mechanisms and acknowledges underreporting as a "broad issue," systemic barriers—particularly for Black communities—create those disparities in ease of reporting, classification, responsiveness, and outcomes especially when compared to some other groups (e.g., Jewish communities).
It's not a coincidence that they align with the biases of the cops themselves.
• The Stats.
Official TPS data for 2024 (the the most recent information available) shows 76 reported hate crimes motivated by anti-Black bias, ranking third behind anti-Jewish (177) and anti-2SLGBTQ+ (79) incidents.
Do you sincerely believe that only 76 black people in Toronto were accosted for racial reasons, whether verbally or physically, in the entire year of 2024? Consider that Toronto has more than twice as many Black people as Jewish people.
The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) has documented systemic racial discrimination, racial profiling, and anti-Black bias in TPS practices, including in use of force, stops, searches, and charging decisions. This fosters deep mistrust: many Black individuals perceive police as unresponsive or hostile to their victimization, leading to reluctance to report.
Victims may fear escalation, secondary victimization, or that their reports will be dismissed or mishandled, especially given historical patterns where police have ignored or downplayed anti-Black incidents while prioritizing others.
If you need further evidence of police bias in dealing with Black victims of hate crimes, check out the #paintgate hashtag here on Mastodon.
Or I can point you to my January 2025 blog post, which delineates my personal experience following the incident at a August 2023 solidarity march.
Tl;dr After being doused in white paint by a white man (an act I documented), I was repeatedly ignored when seeking to report it—despite very visibly being covered in paint and possessing video proof.
(Quick acknowledgement that I WOULDN'T HAVE EVEN BOTHERED HAD THEY NOT ARRESTED TWO WRONG PEOPLE and I needed to get that corrected.)
Cops dismissed my attempts to file a report at the station claiming to be "too busy," yet they had managed to act swiftly on the white perpetrator's claim against unrelated people, including an Indigenous youth.
Only after viral social media pressure and attention did police arrest the assailant for public mischief.
It was also not counted among the hate incidents of 2023 because that classification relies on police discretion in report-writing, and they frequently choose to omit racial dynamics in order to further punish the victim.
Blackness renders us "invisible" to the system, unless we're being perceived as threatening.
The unwritten reality is that "help" is just not coming for Black or Indigenous victims, especially for "hate crimes".
#racism #SystemicRacism #policeDontKeepUsSafe #policeDontPreventCrime #FuckThePolice
