$2.5M for research on discriminatory profiling

For the next seven years, the Observatoire sur les profilages will benefit from a $2.5-million partnership grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, allowing it to pursue its research into discriminatory profiling and initiate new studies.

"Thanks to this grant, the Observatoire will be able to continue its mission, which is to monitor and keep a watchful eye on the profiling practices to which people fall victim in Quebec and Ontario,” said its director, Céline Bellot.

The grant will ensure that the organization remains able “to promote changes in policies and ways of doing things that make this systemic discrimination possible within organizations,” said Bellot, a professor and director of UdeM’s School of Social Work.

‘Punitive and exclusionary’

The organization’s research projects aim to quantitatively and qualitatively document profiling practices and their effects on communities.

"Quantitatively, we are making observations in various sectors – from police services to youth protection, prisons, health and immigration networks – to try to understand the processes by which certain groups are over-represented in punitive or exclusionary dynamics," said Bellot.

One goal is to understand why aboriginal people and people on social assistance are more often imprisoned or kept in detention. Another is to see why racialized or marginalized people are arrested, or why they are more likely to receive visits from youth-protection officials.

At the qualitative level, the observatory’s researchers in law, sociology, criminology, political science and geography collect accounts of the experiences of profiled individuals and testimonies from communities that are collectively affected by them.

Death of George Lloyd

“In the context of the tragic death of George Floyd (during an arrest by police) in Minneapolis, many testimonies open our eyes to how community profiling is reflected,” said Bellot.

 “In black communities, for example, we see that discrimination has the effect of encouraging parents to teach their children from an early age how to deal with the police.”

Through its research, the observatory tries to find ways to combat profiling, in particular by placing its institutional partners in role-playing situations that raise their awareness of systemic biases and their consequences.

The objective is to reconstruct the decision-making processes that lead the people in authority  to act in a discriminatory manner – and ultimately, to correct these situations.

Said Bellot: "We’ve created a strategic learning community of researchers, advocacy organizations, individuals and profiled communities in order to ensure and advocate for a more just and supportive society.”

Six times as many researchers

The Observatoire has been in existence since 2013, when it was awarded a Partnership Development Grant from SSHRC. At its inception, it had six researchers; today, it benefits from the contribution of 36 researchers and 19 partners and advocacy organizations, as well as the collaboration of four government departments.

Among its many accomplishments, it identified the major issues around the imprisonment of homeless people for unpaid fines – an effort that eventually led to Quebec’s Bill 32, which put an end to this discriminatory practice.