America From Abroad : Canada Draws the Line on Crime Data : Officials can’t say how many blacks, whites, Asians or other races commit crimes because, unlike U.S., they don’t keep track. Some say it’s best not to know.

It was just the sort of thing that makes three-inch, shrieking headlines in the tabloids: A Toronto college student heard a woman screaming outside his apartment, ran to her aid and was stabbed through the heart by her assailants.

Newspapers here published the dead Samaritan’s photo on their front pages; he was white. And they printed a brief description of the killers; they were black. They didn’t say another word about race, yet the saturation coverage reinforced reigning stereotypes about the relationship between race and criminal activity in North American cities.

How do these stereotypes compare with the reality of big-city Canada? No one can say. Here in Toronto, as in most Canadian jurisdictions, police aren’t allowed to break down crime statistics by race--much less to release such collated data to the public. No one here can say, authoritatively, whether blacks, whites, Asians or any other group commit disproportionate amounts of crime. And many Canadians argue that their society is better off as a result.

“There’s no need for (such information) at the moment,” says Wilson Head, a retired sociology professor and longtime civil-rights activist in Toronto. “We think the police are just going to use it to belittle, or criminalize, the people that they want to get--and right now, that happens to be the blacks.”

Canada’s taboo on race-based crime statistics is one more telling example of the widely divergent ways in which Canada and America address social problems. In the United States, crimes have been tallied on the basis of race since the 1930s. Many social-justice advocates argue that this listing helps further their goals, since the numbers can be used to push for reforms.

Many Canadians counter that keeping statistics on race and crime only nurtures a belief in some genetic basis for lawbreaking--and worsens racism. The Rodney G. King episode seems ample evidence: The not-guilty verdicts suggest to many here that no matter what statistics show, white American suburbanites will always believe that blacks commit far more than their share of crimes--and deserve whatever the police dish out to them.

“Statistics based on race, color or creed are an affront to the concept of equality before the law,” says Susan Eng, head of the Metro Police Services Board, which oversees Toronto police.

Still, these days there is a growing curiosity in Canada about America’s generation of race-based crime data--and a push to follow the Americans in this touchy matter. Though criminologists here agree that such statistics could be abused, they say there is little reason to believe that quashing all discussion of race and crime really helps fight racial prejudice.

“As the questions are asked, we have to address whether we’re going to answer them,” says University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob.

In all Canada, only two official sets of numbers now exist that link race and crime in any way. One set tracks murderers and their victims by race. The other monitors the proportion of Indians and Inuits in prison. Both are kept by the federal statistical agency, Statistics Canada. Beyond that, there is nothing official in the criminal-justice system.

While the statistical taboo reflects Canada’s attempts to remain officially colorblind, there is also an element of historical oversight. Throughout most of this century, Canada was so overwhelmingly white that statisticians felt there was little point in keeping track of the activities of minority groups.

Canada’s discriminatory immigration policies in those earlier years saw to it that few blacks or other “visible minorities” gained entry. The situation has changed dramatically since immigration laws were revised in the 1960s, however, and now “visible minorities” are arriving in Canada at a far greater rate than immigrant whites.

With the demographics of the country changing all around them, analysts at Statistics Canada in the mid-1980s started asking police to provide information on the race of offenders.

The organization moved cautiously, spending several years deciding just how to tabulate the information. Then, in 1990, it issued a new crime-reporting form to police departments, with a line where officers were to fill in each offender’s race.

“That’s when everyone started shouting and screaming,” criminologist Doob recalls.

Black community leaders argued that the data would be used to reinforce existing stereotypes, or perhaps to give the police an excuse to sweep the streets for young blacks.

“No one has come forward with any proof at all that these data help fight crime,” says Head, a black American who came to Canada to escape ghetto life. “Even the FBI doesn’t claim that. And who are we going to include? Are we going to include the Germans? The Italians? The Greeks?”

Meanwhile, Toronto Mayor June Rowlands reinforced black concerns during her 1991 campaign by making repeated, unsubstantiated remarks about blacks causing a disproportionate number of “problems,” and about a supposed genetic predisposition to heroin addiction among whites.

The indecision over whether to monitor race and crime in tandem is coming at a time of increasing racial tension in Canada. Even before the Los Angeles rioting, there were racially tinged disturbances in the normally tranquil eastern port city of Halifax, and in Montreal. Toronto and Montreal have both seen several fatal shootings of young blacks by the police in the past few years. The most recent such shooting, in Toronto, came just days after the upheavals in Los Angeles, and provoked a mini-riot here.

After the Toronto rampage, the province of Ontario launched a study of racism. It found that blacks were the victims of discrimination on many levels, and recommended--among other things--a close look at the way Ontario blacks fare in the justice system. Ironically, though, no one can conduct such an analysis, since there are no raw statistics.

And so it is that now, in some cases, the calls for racial data-collection are coming from the very minority groups that the taboo is supposed to protect.

Doob, for one, has been commissioned by Indian communities in northern Ontario to comb various files and try to find out whether Indians are arrested more frequently on or off their reservations. And Chinese immigrants in Toronto applauded last year when a local police officer told a crime inquiry that he had been keeping an unauthorized set of books and found that most crimes in Chinatown were being committed by Vietnamese immigrants.

Of Crime and Race U.S. Versus Canada In general, Canada has less violent crime than the United States but more burglaries and thefts. Rate Per 100,000 (1991) MURDER & NONNEGLIGENT MANSLAUGHTER:

UNITED STATES: 9.4

CANADA: 2.5 FORCIBLE RAPE*:

UNITED STATES: 41.2

CANADA: 4.9 ROBBERY:

UNITED STATES: 257.0

CANADA: 105.7 AGGRAVATED ASSAULT:

UNITED STATES: 424.1

CANADA: 145.8 BURGLARY:

UNITED STATES: 1,235.9

CANADA: 1,426.0 LARCENY-THEFT:

UNITED STATES: 3,194.8

CANADA: 3,526.2 MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT:

UNITED STATES: 657.8

CANADA: 427.5 * Note: Rape is not a recognized crime in Canada, where it is termed “sexual assault.”

The ‘Visible Minorities’ Canadians refer to non-whites as “visible minorities.” Now at 8%, the numbers are growing. Chinese and other Asians and blacks are the largest groups. The Trend population in millions

Year / Visible Minorities

1986: 6.3%

1991: 8.2%

1996*: 10.5%

2001*: 12.9%

* Note: Projection.

The Groups (1991) SOURCES: Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics; Statistics Canada; Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports Comparison of Canadian and American Crime Statistics, 1990