After a long day of work, most retail workers anticipate being able to go home and rest. For a Muslim woman from Mississauga, Ont., what happened to her one night was far from that reality.
The woman, who didn’t want to be named for her safety and to avoid issues with her workplace, is one of the many people who were a victim of a hate crime yet remained hesitant to report it to the police.
She said she was walking to the bus stop after a late shift at work when two men in an SUV began following her, yelling slurs and threatening to run her over before eventually speeding away.
“I asked my manager if she could stop scheduling me for closing shifts because of what happened, but she just said I was the only one who can close even though we literally have other people trained to close,” she said.
“I even asked my coworkers if they could at least walk with me, but they just said they were too busy after work. If the people here aren’t taking me seriously, why would the police?” she asked.
Despite her hesitancy to report the incident to police, a Toronto Police dataset published in July 2024 revealed a rising trend in police-reported hate crimes, to 365 in 2023 from 133 in 2018.
According to the dataset, only 20 per cent out of 1,350 hate crimes reported in Toronto led to an arrest.
Toronto Police published the details on its public dataset website. The dataset consists of police-reported hate crimes investigated by its Hate Crime Unit since 2018. Calculations were made using Microsoft Excel, with small changes made to blank information to simplify data analysis.
Alongside the Toronto Police dataset, Et Cetera reviewed specific hate crime incidents and reform bills through the Access to Information and Privacy Act (ATIP), which allows people to request federal files held by any government institution.
Caroline Erentzen, an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University in the psychology department, said only 30 per cent of hate crimes that occur are reported to the police.
She said much of this trepidation among individuals stems from negative experiences and mistrust towards police.
“Police don’t see themselves as biased. We are all biased to be fair, and you don’t realize that because often the way you see the world makes sense to you, and we think of bias as something unjustified or wrong, and so do the cops. Do the cops think they’re acting in bias? Probably not for the most part,” she said.
Hank Idsinga, the retired head of the Toronto homicide squad, said he doesn’t want this mistrust in police to become a crutch that makes people avoid the system.
“There’s definitely been negative instances of police and different communities, and if people don’t trust police because of that then those are bridges [we] have to try and re-build.”
The lack of arrests for police reports becomes understandable when breaking down how police perceive and respond to certain hate crimes.
According to the Toronto Police dataset, the most common hate crime was mischief with less than $5,000 in damage. Idsinga said hate crimes are treated like any other crime despite the need for hate crimes to be treated more sensitively.
“Let’s say someone spray paints a swastika on the side of a Jewish community centre. Is it illegal to do a swastika? No, but it’s illegal to spray paint,” Idsinga said.
Alongside mischief, the TPS dataset reports assault and uttering bodily harm as common hate crime occurrences. Idsinga said although it is easy to solve at times because they’re often on video, tracking the suspects is labour-intensive.
Along with fewer resources, Idsinga said investigative work has dropped throughout the years. Negative attention towards police throughout the years and people not wanting to work in Toronto led to this decline.
Erentzen agrees with many of the points Idsinga made. She said nothing in the Criminal Code truly defines what a hate crime is due to the ambiguity of the term, which leads to police having to make their own internal decisions.
“[Sometimes] it’s based on their expectations of what hate crimes look like. And that’s not always legally correct or relying on things that are necessarily true. So they may say, well, if this was a real hate crime, they would have shouted words or they would have said X, Y, and Z,” Erentzen said.
She said there’s no consistency with the term hate crime, which often leads to a lot of back and forth between people who may or may not know what they are looking for. She said in Canada, the deliberation of the occurrence being a hate crime may not even take place until the sentencing stage.
George Fisher, a retired lawyer who practiced in Massachusetts for five years, said there are similarities in how the U.S. and Canada trial hate crimes.
He said hate crime cases are often hard to win, as juries are often skeptical of racial bias unless there is hard proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Something that becomes difficult because of a lack of a definition of a hate crime.
“The case is usually charged in two pieces. If the person hits somebody and the alleged person is race, those are two separate allegations. They can be guilty of the hitting, but not the hate-motivated allegation,” Fisher said.
The Criminal Code references hate-motivated crimes in some instances, but the closest instance is section 138 which outlines hate propaganda.
There have been attempts within the Department of Justice to reform hate crime laws. A document retrieved through ATIP reveals a proposal to reform hate crime laws from 2022.
The document proposes outlining a hate crime section within the Criminal Code, stating the lack of a definition impedes investigations of hate crimes. It states the Department of Justice is working on a bill to put forward to become law by the end of 2022.
However, there have been no new updates or information about this supposed bill outside of this document.
Idsinga said there needs to be more of a nexus between different legislations and offences within the system.
“I find it ridiculous that the federal government can ban different terrorist organizations, and then someone can fly the flag of that terrorist organization within the country and it’s not an arrestable offence,” Idsinga said.
Erentzen said there needs to be institutional reform for actual progress to be made. While there are police officers who are advocating for change and recognition of how hate crimes are handled, there needs to be better training and diversification within the police force.
“Whose interest are they representing? Who wrote our laws? White men,” she said. “The way you do [your job] leads to false confessions, racial bias and victims not getting services.
"The way you’ve done things doesn’t mean it’s right just because you’ve been doing it for a long time," Erentzen said.
