I agree with pretty much everything you say here. I had noticed as well that the article merely mentions how Hispanics and Asians were underrepresented in the random arrests.

What I also noticed was that Aboriginals were overrepresented but that they added that little comment about how the numbers stabilise when they account for mutliple arrests of the same individual. What’s up with that I wonder? If Kingston is anything like Montreal, there are many homeless Aboriginal youths who ran away from their communities. Unfortunately, many of them have problems with drug or alcoholol abuse.

If this is the case, I suspect that this is the sub-group of Aboriginals they particularly have a tendancy to stop repeatedly, as happens here. These youths may be repeatedly stopped for questionning or arrested due to being intoxicated, even when they’re not actually doing anything wrong. This, of course, is part of the wider picture as well, that of historic oppression of Aboriginals and what has led their communities to have so many social problems that their young people flee to the cities, where other problems await them. This is an issue that concerns me a great deal.

Anyway, you’re right about “Kingston police profiles Asians as law-abiding citizens.” making an interesting headline. It would sure throw readers for a loop! I remember reading an article a couple of years back in the Montreal Gazette about how Chinese crime is not dealt with very much by the authorities becuase it takes place mostly among the Chinese themselves. I wonder if there’s something to that.

A fellow anthro student at UdeM was working as a border officer (Canadian side) as a summer job. Apparently, they were fairly clear about the “need” for profiling… Sure, they will randomly select someone, once in a while. But they’re trained to be suspicious of certain “types of people.” Or, at least, they were trained that way, a while ago. It’s probably not a great strategy to profile as anyone wanting to pass something through knows to just ask a quiet-looking girl to do it.
Now, let’s be clear. Yeah, yeah, profiling is bad, lame, despicable, silly, damaging, etc. But the fact of the matter is that we all have tendency to gauge people quickly. Honestly, how do you react when you see someone dressed in one of those sleeveless jeans jackets go to an academic conference? Conversely, people at an anthro dept. reacted pretty loudly when they saw someone dressed in a three-piece suit (he was teaching at a military college).
For some people, it’s part of the job, to gauge people. Now, what’s quite sad is that it takes “racial” lines. But that’s part of a broader dynamic. Sadly enough, there probably is more violence and crime among some of those populations, partly because of social conditions and the expectation of guilt. In Quebec, a few Haitians are using the stereotypes to scare people off or even to commit crimes. The source might be prejudice but prejudice entertains itself.
What the article mentions but doesn’t delve upon is that some groups (especially “Asians”) seem to be stopped proportionally less often. A complete study should explain this too. Is it because they tend not to get involved in situations requiring police intervention? Is it because they’re “profiled” as being too quiet for criminal activities?
From the article:

black people comprised 0.6 per cent of the population; however, they accounted for 2.2 per cent of all stops

and then

Asians make up 2.5 per cent of the population, and accounted for 1.0 per cent of stops

It’d be great to have all of the statistics but the second one seems about as significant as the first one. There are more than five times more “Asians” than “black people” (original capitalization), yet “Asians” are stopped much less than “black people.” It seems that “white people” were stopped pretty much proportionally to their demography (92.7% pop., 92.6% stops).
To spin it another way: “Kingston police profiles Asians as law-abiding citizens.” Nice headline?
Other obvious thing to note, the concept of “race” is taken as a given and “Hispanic people” (an ethnic category) are described along the “racial minorities” of “Asians” and “South Asians.” Wonder where they put West Asians… 😉

Still, it’s great that the Kingston police is “doing something” about racial profiling. After all, police officers might not all be the close-minded bigots some people make them to be! 😉