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Hate crimes backlash


On March 17, the Toronto Police Service presented its annual report on hate crime to the Police Services Board.

The police have been collecting this data since 1993. As is often the case, the 2015 report contains some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that the overall number of police-reported hate crimes has decreased by about 8 per cent, to 134 incidents from the 146 reported in 2014. Since 2010, the numbers have ebbed and flowed from a low of 123 to a high of 146. If we look at the historical data in five-year segments, we see an overall decline from an average of 256 incidents per year from 1998 to 2002 to about 135 between 2011 and 2015.

This is a lot better that the highest number ever reported in Toronto – the 338 incidents in 2001. Almost 200 of those occurred between September and November, after the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Members of the Jewish and Muslim communities were almost equally targeted.

But while it’s great that the 2015 numbers are down compared to previous years, one statistic jumps out at me beyond the obvious observation that any number of hate crimes is too many: the increase in reported incidents against the Muslim community, a number that has risen by more than 60 per cent over last year, from 16 to 26.

While well short of the 57 occurrences in 2001, it is the second-highest number recorded against Muslims since the Toronto Police Service began tracking the data.

It’s not surprising that anti-Muslim sentiment is growing. In an increasingly interconnected world, people in Canada will be influenced by events taking place far away.

In the 15 years that I tracked local and national hate crime statistics for the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, we saw this pattern many times: increased tension in the Middle East triggered incidents here.

The police note that a spike in the number of incidents reported in November may have been caused by the attack at the Bataclan theatre and other targets in Paris or, more locally, the announcement by the Canadian government that it would proceed with the admission of 25,000 Syrian refugees.

But, really, what can explain why individuals are criminally harassed for what they wear, or that a place of prayer is vandalized because of fear of the religion practised within its walls?

I realize that 2015’s 134 incidents, even if multiplied by a factor of 10, would be a small number compared to Toronto’s population.

But I take little comfort in that. The impact of a hate crime goes far beyond the moment and far beyond the individual. These are crimes against communities. Hell, they are crimes against all of us.

Last month, persons unknown scrawled, “Syrians are animals,” “Real Canadians hate Syrians” and “Burn all mosques” across the walls of a junior high school in Calgary.

In the 1990s, Roma refugee claimants housed in a motel in Scarborough were the target of a skinhead demonstration. “Canada is not a garbage can,” their signs proclaimed, and they invited motorists to “honk if you hate gypsies.”

As a society we can take some credit for the fact that we have succeeded in pushing overt hate to the margins of society, but even after being sidelined, it makes its way back into the public square. 

The messages of the haters remain remarkably consistent. We need to be consistent as well. And while it’s unlikely that the TPS hate crime report will ever say “nothing to report,” that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make that our target.

Len Rudner is a human rights consultant based in Toronto.


Bias by the numbers


143 Average number of hate/bias crimes per year in Toronto between 2006 and 2015.

134 Number of hate/bias crimes in 2015.

60% Increase in number of hate crimes incidents targeting Muslim community in 2015, most of those involving criminal harassment and linked to events in the Middle East, police say.

58 Number of hate/bias crimes motivated by religion in 2015, of which 26 involved the Muslim community.

430(4.1) Section of the Criminal Code passed in 2001 under the Anti-Terrorism Act that allows courts to impose stiffer penalties on hate-related attacks on churches, mosques, synagogues or temples. 

Source: Toronto Police Service

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