Poll Says Indo-Canadians Perceived as Criminals INDOlink News Bureau

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Of those in the poll who held ethnic groups most responsible, 56 per cent specifically identified "Indian/East Indian" and 45 per cent listed "Asian/Oriental,” the newspaper reported March 16.

By comparison, five per cent of the same group singled out "Caucasian/white" and only one per cent were worried about "Afro-American/Black," "Middle Eastern/Arabs/Muslims" and "Italians."

An Ipsos Reid spokesman said people were allowed to give more than one racial group in their answers, and all the responses were gathered into groups that best reflected the responses.

The Vancouver figures are part of a national survey of public perceptions of safety and crime within communities commissioned by CanWest News Service.

The poll was conducted on-line between Feb. 24 and March 3 in a representative sample of more than 8,431 Canadians.

But in an interview, Vancouver Police Insp. Kash Heed, commanding officer of the department's district 3 -- southeast Vancouver -- said actual statistics show the reverse of the poll findings.

"In the Lower Mainland, the majority of crimes are committed by Caucasians," he said.

"That's a true figure, it's a reliable and valid figure based simply on arrest statistics."

He said public perceptions are swayed by media coverage of criminal events, including the Air India bombing, which involve members of South Asian and Sikh communities.

Heed said he thinks the beliefs reflected by the poll respondents are indicative of a desire to look for someone else to blame.

"I guess it's human nature to point elsewhere for your problems. We don't want to believe as a Canadian society that we're responsible.

"These problems were born in Canada -- they didn't come in from elsewhere."

Analysing the results of the poll, experts in criminology and sociology suggested the divide between people's perception and the reality can be attributed to a number of factors, including media coverage of crimes and a historical perception of various ethnic groups.

"There is really a dominant discourse or understanding among people in Vancouver that we do have an ethnicized crime problem, and that the ethnicized crime problem has largely to do with South Asian and Asian gangs," said Renisa Mawani, a UBC sociology professor who specializes in issues around crime and race.

Asked what might lead to this perception, Mawani said she believes it is "incredibly complicated."

"I think there are multiple reasons why people perceive crime in ethnicized or racialized ways," she said, "and I think that has to do with histories of migration and groups of people that have been historically deemed to be problematic, and also the responses of various institutions including the criminal justice system, the media and so on."

She said solutions to the problem can likely only result from discussion about the issue.

"A start would be to at least generate some kind of critical dialogue about why there is this gap between perception and reality and what sorts of effects this has on people's lives," she said.

"I think if there is more initiative put forward by community groups and more formal organizations like the police, it might even have some kind of effect," she added.

Mawani said it is important to pursue such answers and solutions because the perceptions unveiled in the poll go further than just personal beliefs.

"It's not just about perception, these perceptions have a real impact on people's lives," she said. "These things do have an effect on how people live and they do produce situations of inequality," she added, pointing to such things as racial profiling.

Though Mawani pushed for dialogue on the issue, some others felt the poll is not an accurate reflection of people's real perceptions.

Criminologist Neil Boyd of Simon Fraser University said he also took issue with the findings, but for different reasons.

"The idea that the colour of your skin has anything to do with your tendency to crime is absurd," he said.

"It's kind of disturbing to think that a lot of people out there believe that ethnicity matters when it comes to crime," he added.

"I guess what they do is, they link a story that has an East Indian gang war or an East Indian drug-dealer and they draw a totally unsupported inference between the fact that the person was East Indian and the fact that they're involved in the drug trade, failing to recognize that's a tiny proportion of the East Indian community.

"If you get coverage of an East Indian drug war and you don't know anything about East Indians, you might think all East Indians are like that."

Still others took issue with the poll itself, questioning the reasons for even asking the question about ethnicity and crime.

"I think this poll is racially motivated," said Balwant Gill, head of Vancouver’s Guru Nanak temple. "Why are they picking one community and comparing it with another community? We are all Canadians," he said.

"Picking one community, that's not the right answer," he added. "They should find a solution, not just pick minorities in polls. I disagree with it."

In addition to disagreeing with the questions, Gill said he also took issue with the findings.

"There is also lots of crime in white communities," he said, "so I don't know why they are picking the minorities."