Abstract
S: Long considered a safe and tolerant city, Toronto has been shaken during the last ten years by a series of incidents involving the police and black people which has led to a serious deterioration in police‐community relations. Drawing on evidence submitted to the 1989 Ontario Task Force on Race Relations and Policing, on newspaper reports and local interviews, this paper criticizes some commonsense constructions of the relationship between “race”, crime and policing. Rejecting conventional explanations of “ethnic criminality” and personal prejudice, the paper focuses on the question of institutional racism within the police force.

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