By Geoffrey Carney-Knisely , Marquianna Griffin , Alaxandria Crawford , Kamesha Spates and Parvati Singh

The suicide rate for Black youth has increased by 60% between 2007 and 2020. Direct or vicarious racial trauma experienced through exposure to police brutality may underlie these concerning trends.MethodsWe obtained nationally aggregated monthly counts of suicides for non-Hispanic Black and White youth (age ≤ 24 years) and adults (age > 24 years) from the National Mortality Vital Statistics restricted-use data files provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2013 to 2019. Monthly counts of Black youth suicides constituted our main outcome. We defined our exposure as the monthly counts of police killings of unarmed Black persons over 84 months (2013 to 2019), retrieved from the Mapping Police Violence database. We used ARIMA (AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average) time-series analyses to examine whether Black youth suicides increased within 0 to 3 months following police killings of unarmed Black persons, controlling for autocorrelation and corresponding series of white youth suicides.ResultsSuicides among Black youth increase by ~1 count within three months following an increase in police killings of unarmed Black persons (coefficient=0.95,p<0.05), which approximates to about 267 suicides among Black youth over our study period. The observed increase in suicides concentrates among Black male youth.

Annals of Epidemiology. Volume 94, June 2024, Pages 91-99. June 2024.

By Kasey Henricks and Ruben Ortiz

The Irrelevance of Innocence” is a case study of Chicago that focuses on parking tickets that are written under false pretenses. We leverage multiple data sets against one another to demonstrate that more than one in eight tickets over a six-year span were written under conditions when restrictions did not apply. Then, we situate these findings within a multilevel framework to answer three questions: (1) Are errored tickets more likely to be issued in neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black or Latinx residents? (2) Are errored tickets more likely to be issued by patrol officers as opposed to parking enforcement officers? and (3) Does ethnoracial composition moderate the relationship between ticketing authorities and errored tickets? The implications of our findings (1) quantitatively trouble the ontological assumptions of data that are defined from a policing standpoint and (2) underscore an adjudicative process that routinely sanctions drivers without cause.

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, March 2023. 19p.

By Statistics Canada

Having a high level of confidence in the Federal Parliament, the justice system and courts, the police, and the Canadian media can be seen as a vital measure for assessing the health of democracy in Canada. Confidence in these institutions reflects the sense that they are safe, effective, transparent and accountable.

From October 2022 to January 2023, about two-thirds (67%) of Canadians reported having a high level of confidence in the police. This was a greater proportion than other institutions, such as the justice system and courts (51%), the Federal Parliament (36%) and the Canadian media (33%).

In the context of increased diversity and immigration being the main driver of population growth in Canada, it is relevant to investigate if different groups of the population share these views similarly.

Using preliminary data from the Survey Series on People and their Communities, this report examines whether racialized and non-racialized, non-Indigenous people in Canada have differing levels of confidence in public institutions, which is a key indicator of Canada's Quality of Life Framework.

Southeast Asian, Black and Japanese people are less likely to report confidence in police

Previous surveys have shown that Black Canadians report lower levels of confidence in police than non-Indigenous and non-racialized people. Along the same lines, this survey reported that Southeast Asian (63%), Black (52%) and Japanese (47%) people in Canada were less likely to have confidence in the police, compared with those who did not belong to a racialized group and were not Indigenous (69%). Some subgroups had notably lower confidence in the police, like Southeast Asian (45%) and Black (32%) people who were born in Canada.

Most racialized groups report higher levels of confidence in the justice system and courts than non-racialized, non-Indigenous people

By contrast, some racialized groups were more likely to be confident in the justice system and courts. Compared with their non-racialized, non-Indigenous counterparts (49%), racialized groups—such as South Asian, Chinese, Filipino, Arab, Latin American, Southeast Asian, West Asian and Korean people in Canada—were more likely to have confidence in the justice system and courts (ranging from 58% to 69%; Table 1). However, Japanese people in Canada (36%) were less likely to be confident in this institution. Recent South Asian, Chinese, Filipino, Arab and Southeast Asian immigrants reported particularly high confidence (Tables 2 and 3).

Similar patterns were found for levels of confidence in the Federal Parliament and the Canadian media. Japanese people in Canada were less likely to be confident in the Federal Parliament (24%) and the Canadian media (21%) than their non-racialized, non-Indigenous counterparts (31% for both institutions). However, South Asian, Chinese, Black, Filipino, Latin American, Southeast Asian, West Asian and Korean people in Canada were more likely to have confidence in the Federal Parliament (ranging from 44% to 58%; Table 1) and the Canadian media (ranging from 35% to 45%; Table 1).

Among most racialized groups, recent immigrants had a substantially higher level of confidence in the media and the Federal Parliament. For example, among South Asian people, 25% of those born in Canada had confidence in the Canadian media, compared with 57% of recent immigrants (Table 2, 3).

This report identified that the intersection between racialized groups and immigrant status was associated with confidence in all four institutions. Future research using the Survey Series on People and their Communities will be useful for tracking relevant indicators in the Quality of Life Framework among racialized groups as well as immigrants in Canada.

Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2022. 5p.