Article Provided By : Our Windsor
Source : https://www.ourwindsor.ca/news-story/10277021-hate-crime-and-racism-at-our-doorstep-in-waterloo-region/
Date: 2020-17-01

An inflatable doll is found hanging off the Highway 85 overpass in Waterloo with racist messages. A cyclist approaches a couple walking on the Spur Line Trail in Kitchener shouting xenophobic slurs before brandishing a knife. A driver with her children and mother is followed into a Cambridge parking lot and bawled out by another driver with racist remarks before having her door damaged.

The above is just a small sample of hate-motivated incidents that occurred over an 11-day span last October, around Thanksgiving.

Waterloo Regional Police Chief Bryan Larkin called it disgusting and unacceptable.

“I don’t understand how we land here in 2020,” he told the local media at the time.

In the weeks that followed, there was more of the same.

On Nov. 9, police arrested five youths in Kitchener after two passengers on the LRT allegedly endured racial slurs before being spit on and pelted with stones.

The suspects allegedly brandished a knife and made death threats before setting fire to a garbage container at a plaza on Fairway Road South, then approached another victim at a grocery store. They allegedly spit in his face, threw rocks and hurled racial slurs before robbing him of belongings.

This came amid a rash of racist and hateful graffiti found in various public spots such as local schools.

According to Det. Const. Graham Hawkins with the Waterloo Regional Police Service’s gang and hate crime unit, graffiti incidents were on the rise in 2020, with 55 as of Nov. 26, when he spoke to the Chronicle, compared to 38 the whole year prior.

Not all are hate-motivated, and the increase can be partly attributed to better “front-line reporting” by community organizations and neighbours that now recognize it as something important to document, as opposed to just wiping it away, he says.

Last spring, a family in Waterloo had their property damaged and front door splattered with red paint. A letter left behind included racist insults and a death threat. The Laurelwood community rallied to raise awareness on Facebook and helped the family clean up their home and make necessary repairs.

Whether the pandemic has played a role in fuelling “confused youths” often responsible is difficult to say, but issues in the U.S. have played a role, Hawkins believes.

“Definitely the (George Floyd) situation ignited lot of emotions in a lot of different people,” he said.

While Waterloo Region hosted peaceful protest in 2020, hatred on social media knows no boundaries, according to Dr. Sarah Shafiq, with the Coalition of Muslim Women, who works with organizations such as Community Justice Initiatives to diffuse racial tension and repair rifts created by xenophobia.https://876649dbbfa95685e74ec6ca7a72df13.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Tension driven by the U.S. election — “It definitely impacts us here in Canada,” she said.

“From our side, we’re asking our community to be vigilant. We are expecting this to continue for the short term.”

According to the most up-to-date information released data by Statistics Canada, the number of police reported hate crime in the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge area dropped to 15 incidents in 2019 — a five-year low compared to 39 in 2018, 53 in 2017, 19 in 2016 and 51 in 2015.

However, Shafiq said those numbers don’t tell the story of what’s happening in the broader community, as only a small percentage of hate crimes are reported to police.

“If a crime or an assault is committed and there’s an element of hate, that is an added factor in the process in the court of law,” Shafiq says. “But if harassment is taking place between neighbours and if there’s an element of race, that element is often disregarded as an aggravating factor.

“There’s a huge gap, and it seems incidents keep happening with burden of proof on victims to record and document and collect evidence.”

Shafiq said there are many incidents people never hear about, like one recently at a local restaurant where owners were distraught dealing with a customer shouting xenophobic comments.

In many cases, the hands of law enforcement are tied and can’t take any meaningful action, Shafiq said.

The resolution rate of most incidents is also low because such crime is usually faceless and happens in the darkness of night, Hawkins said.

Yet issues are being brought to light more now than in the past, he believes.

“We’ve seen definitely a lot better diligence in police services creating that information and awareness for our community,” Hawkins said, adding that the hate unit continues to works with the equity, inclusion and diversity team and community resource officers to improve education and response.

— with files from The Record