TORONTO (AP) — City police have filed a lawsuit seeking $1.4 billion in damages from the Toronto Star newspaper over a series of articles saying that police unfairly targeted blacks.
The lawsuit filed Friday pits Canada's largest municipal force against the country's largest daily. It claims that the articles published last year suggesting that police treat blacks differently than whites defamed the entire force of 7,200 officers.
“Accusing the members of the Toronto police service of racism is a very serious allegation,” said Tim Danson, a lawyer representing the Toronto Police Association, which filed the suit.
The association previously demanded an apology and retraction, but the Star refused.
Mary Deanne Shears, the Star's managing editor, said Friday the newspaper stands by the stories.
“They were fair and balanced and accurate,” she said. “The analysis was sound and we will vigorously fight this lawsuit in the courts.”
The series was based on information from police force's arrest database, listing arrests from 1996 to early 2002, that the Star obtained through freedom of information legislation.
In October, police Chief Julian Fantino called for a review of his force after public outcry over the Star articles, which suggested a pattern of treatment that could be racial profiling.
Danson said Friday that the Star's stories resulted in “numerous falsehoods, malicious innuendoes and untruthful allegations.”<p>*** Any comment/clarification/critique from TCE's Toronto bureau?

It works out to about $300,000 (Cdn) per cop but they'll never see a cent of it.
The story was a remarkable piece of work started by reporter Jim Rankin who spent several years going through the freedom of information process to get ahold of a police department data base.<p>If interested, the whole series and fallout stories are at www.thestar.ca. On the left side of the home page is the Special Sections title. Go to the "Race and Crime" subhead.<p>Police here, by law, are not allowed to interpret crime stats by race. However, Jim broke down the information to include crime, detention without bail and traffic offences to conclude that blacks are treated differently than others when encountered by police. His findings were confirmed by an expert from York University who tweeked the data every way he could and came up with the same result.<p>The police chief, Julian Fantino and the police union have gone crazy over it which reminds me of Jack Nicholson's line from that Marine movie: "You can't handle the truth."<p>On the same day the police union started its lawsuit, an interesting case was being heard by the Ontario appeal court where the Ontario Attorney General's office was attempting to oveturn a lower court ruling that acquitted former Toronto Raptor basketball player Dee Brown of drunk driving because his rights had been violated by police racial profiling.<p>I'll reproduce part of the story from the front page of The Star. (The Globe and Mail also saw fit to give it A1.)<p>TRACEY TYLER
LEGAL AFFAIRS REPORTER<p>Racial profiling exists and it deserves to be remedied, a lawyer for Ontario's attorney-general told the province's highest court in an extraordinary admission yesterday.<p>"I'm not challenging the existence of racial profiling by the police," crown prosecutor James Stewart told a three-judge panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal, in what is believed to be the attorney general's first public acknowledgement that the practice occurs.<p>"I'm not disputing that the phenomenon does exist," Stewart said. "The reason I'm not disputing that is because there is significant social science research done at the behest of the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System that it does occur."<p>The commission's report has been collecting dust since it was filed with the provincial government seven years ago. The commission found that black men were disproportionately stopped by police, Stewart said, noting "this is a problem that merits corrective action." <p>A lawyer for the Urban Alliance on Race Relations called the admission one of "tremendous significance" that takes the profiling debate to the next level.<p>Stewart made the concession while asking the court to restore the impaired driving conviction of Decovan "Dee" Brown, a former Toronto Raptor who alleges that while returning from a Halloween party early on Nov. 1, 1999, he was stopped on the Don Valley Parkway for "driving while black."
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