Rapper and historian Aly Ndiaye (a.k.a. Webster) at the inauguration of a mural honouring Afro-Quebeckers in Karim-Ouellet Park, Quebec City, on Oct. 24.Renaud Philippe/The Globe and Mail
New data from Quebec City police show that Black, Arab and, to a lesser extent, Latino people are overrepresented in police stops, a recurring pattern across North America. Researchers and advocates say this is evidence of racial profiling, which the force denies.
The data, obtained by The Globe and Mail through an access to information request, break down by race the 4,567 stops done by Quebec City police between Jan. 1, 2023, and July 13, 2024.
They include street checks and arbitrary traffic stops conducted under a Highway Safety Code provision invalidated by the Quebec Superior Court in a landmark 2022 racial profiling case. Police continued to use the provision pending appeal by the Quebec government, but the Court of Appeal confirmed the lower court ruling in October. Street checks occur when police ask individuals to provide ID or other information without detaining or arresting them.
White people were under-represented in police stops, making up 83.1 per cent of stops, compared with 90.6 per cent of the Quebec City population, according to the 2021 census.
Black people represented 7.8 per cent of the stops, almost double their share in the Quebec City population, which was 4.1 per cent. Arab people represented 3.1 per cent of the stops, while they accounted for only 1.8 per cent of the city’s population.
Latinos, who make up 1.6 per cent of the population in Quebec City, were also overrepresented in police stops, with 2.3 per cent.
Quebec’s human-rights commission recommended in 2011 that police departments collect and publish data on the race of individuals during police actions, but in a 2020 follow-up report, noted that none had done so.
Last January, the Ministry of Public Security said 12 of the province’s 30 municipal forces had implemented the collection of racial data. The Globe sent access to information requests to each one, but most initially did not respond or said the data did not exist or were incomplete, forcing the news organization to appeal to the access to information commission. Data have since been trickling in.
Aly Ndiaye (a.k.a. Webster), a 44-year-old hip-hop artist and historian who grew up in Quebec City, said he’s been subjected to dozens of arbitrary police stops in his life, both on foot and while driving.
“Once, it happened three times in the span of two days,” said Mr. Ndiaye, who is Black.
Tired of the pointless questioning, he learned the relevant provisions of the Code of Penal Procedure, which says that “a person may refuse to give his name and address or further information” to a peace officer “so long as he is not informed of the offence alleged against him.”
“As a teenager, it’s like, well, this is one of the realities of living in Quebec City. Being Black, you know that you’re going to get pulled over by the police, that’s for sure,” Mr. Ndiaye said.
Maxim Fortin, a spokesperson for the Quebec City section of the League of Rights and Freedoms (LDL, in French), a civil rights advocacy group, was not surprised by the pattern, which he said is a result of racial profiling by police.
“In Quebec City, as in many cities in North America and Europe, racialized people, particularly Black people, are more targeted by police checks,” he said in an e-mail.
Earlier this year, The Globe found similar results in Longueuil, a large Montreal suburb that was ordered to collect and publish race-based data on police stops in a 2020 court judgment.
Sandra Dion, a spokesperson for the Quebec City police, said police stops aim to prevent crime and cannot be based on a discriminatory motive. “There is therefore no question of racial profiling in these police stops, but rather of criminal profiling,” she said.
Victor Armony, a sociologist at Université du Québec à Montréal who studied racial profiling by police in Montreal and Repentigny, another suburb, said “it has been amply demonstrated that the explanation for these disparities does not lie in a supposed increased criminality among racialized groups.”
In reports prepared for the Montreal police service and published in 2019 and 2023, Prof. Armony and colleagues found that, based on arrests data, criminality could not explain how much more minorities were subject to police stops.
The explanation for the discrepancy, he said, then lies in a defect with police stops. These are based on the discretionary judgment of the police officer, which is “very susceptible to conscious and unconscious bias,” Prof. Armony said in an e-mail.
Ms. Dion, of the Quebec City police, offered a different explanation: comparing race-based data for police stops in 2023-24 with the 2021 census is misleading, she said, because of the high levels of immigration in Quebec since then.
Massimiliano Mulone, a criminologist at the University of Montreal who worked with Prof. Armony on racial profiling, said in an interview that this was unlikely to change the results significantly. Prof. Mulone said a similar objection was raised when they studied racial profiling in Repentigny – their 2021 report used data from the 2016 census – so they increased the local share of the Black population in the analysis. This diminished, but did not erase, the observed bias.
The province welcomed nearly 370,000 immigrants, most of them temporary, in 2022 and 2023. There is no available breakdown of their race or location within the province yet.