10  A Discourse-Historical Analysis of Racial Profiling in Lethbridge News Media

Background: Racism

Research continues to demonstrate the overrepresentation of Black peoples in the correctional systems of both the US and Canada (Alexander 2012; Davis 2003; Maynard 2017; Sapers 2013; Wacquant 2001, 2010). Today, while Black peoples represent about 3.4 percent of the general Canadian population, they made up 7.3 percent of all federally incarcerated offenders in 2018 (Public Safety Canada 2019). Provincially, criminologists Owusu-Bempah and Wortley demonstrated that while Black peoples made up 3.9 percent of Ontario’s population, they represented almost 18 percent of admissions into provincial correctional facilities in 2010–11 (as cited in Maynard 2017, 110).

A recent CBC project, “Black on the Prairies,” has also shown that Alberta holds the second-largest Black population in Canada (Fundira 2021). Overall, Black people represent 3.3 percent of Alberta’s total population, with a median age of 27.7 in 2016 (Statistics Canada 2019, 18). However, Wortley and Owusu-Bempah’s study revealed that Black peoples represented 5 percent of admissions to the province’s correctional facilities in 2010–11 while they made up only 1.4 percent of the Alberta population during those years (Maynard 2017, 110). Maynard (2017) points out that Black peoples are overpoliced, meaning that they are subjected to frequent and often unnecessary police stops and questioning (carding / street checks), and they are more likely to be charged. When convicted, Black peoples are also more likely to be “severely sentenced and incarcerated” (83). This harsher approach to sentencing Black people is evidenced by their disproportionate representation in Canada’s federal prison population.

Racism is the myth of racial superiority found within European ideology. It has been used to motivate, explain, or legitimize the exploitation, oppression, and extermination of non-European people, including Black peoples. While racial inferiority has been convincingly debunked, Van Dijk (1991) points out that this does not negate the ongoing existence of racism. Denying that racism exists ignores the evidence that racism continues to impact the daily lives of Black and other racialized groups. Indeed, the ideology of racial inferiority has been used to justify the colonization and enslavement of Black peoples (Fanon 1968; Loomba 2015; Van Dijk 1991) and is still marshalled to justify the subjection of Black peoples to hyperpolice surveillance, often under the semblance of a “law and order” rhetoric associated with the “war on drugs” policies of the 1980s (Alexander 2012; Davis 2003; Maynard 2017). Alexander (2012) indicates that the beginning of the war on drugs in the US in the early 1980s coincided with the collapse of blue-collar factory jobs, which severely impacted Blacks in inner-city communities (63–64). This decline in legitimate employment opportunities among inner-city residents, Alexander argues, “created economic desperation, leading some to sell drugs—most notably crack cocaine”—a drug that devastated inner-city Black communities (65). The crack cocaine “epidemic” served as an opportunity for law enforcement to “finally justify an all-out war on a racially defined ‘enemy’” (65).

Similar developments “linking danger and drugs to the Black population” occurred in Canada in the 1980s, when then prime minister Brian Mulroney declared a war on drugs, which was invigorated once more by the election of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government from 2006–15 (Maynard 2017, 92–97). This declaration, Maynard (2017) argues, allowed the Mulroney government to roll back on state-supported social-welfare programs. The Black federal prison population increased by approximately 70 percent during the Harper regime (Maynard 2017, 97). Maynard (2017) contends that the sharp increase in Black incarceration in Canada was a “direct result of successive, ideologically driven and racially enforced drug laws” (98). Racist attitudes are central in white support for “get tough on crime and antiwelfare measures” in the US (Alexander 2012, 68). Prison, then, is the new caste system, and the “war on drugs” policy is the primary channel that has contributed to the overrepresentation of Black peoples in prisons, in both the US and Canada (Alexander 2012; Davis 2003; Maynard 2017; Wacquant 2001).

Racial Profiling: Carding

Carding is a law enforcement tactic that disproportionately targets Black peoples. This practice appears to be central in the early Canadian academic discourse and analysis of racial profiling, especially from the province of Ontario (Gunn 2019; Okeke 2012; Rankin 2010; Rankin et al. 2002; Wortley and Tanner 2003; Ray 2019). For instance, in 2002, the Toronto Police Service was on the defensive after crime reporters for the Toronto Star (Star) newspaper alleged that the police carded Black peoples more than any other group in that city (Rankin 2010; Rankin et al. 2002; Wortley and Tanner 2003). This practice is an example of racial profiling and has been of great concern to African Canadians long before the Star’s investigation (Henry, Hastings, and Freer 1996). The Alberta Human Rights Commission (2021) defines racial profiling as an individual’s subjection to differential treatment or greater scrutiny because of negative stereotypes related to their race or skin colour, ancestry or place of origin, and/or religious affiliations, in conjunction with gender or sexual orientation.

There is considerable evidence that people of colour are subjected to differential treatment by police (Goff 2001; Weitzer, Tuch, and Skogan 2008; Wortley and Owusu-Bempah 2009; Wortley and Tanner 2003). This targeting includes abusive treatment, misuse of police discretionary powers, and racial profiling related to carding practices (Goff 2001; Weitzer, Tuch, and Skogan 2008; Welch 2016; Wortley and Owusu-Bempah 2011). Police officers exercise discretion as to whether to arrest or warn a suspect when they believe the person has committed a crime, and the seriousness of the offence or prior criminal record is not a concern (Goff 2001). Discretion becomes problematic when the race/ethnicity of a suspect becomes a decisive factor in its application. Fairness in officers’ use of discretion to stop and search is “one of the most controversial issues in policing, and maybe the most common form of abuse” that Black people often experience (Bowling and Phillips 2002, 138; Maynard 2017). Indeed, Goff (2001) points out, police discretion can “deteriorate into discrimination, violence, and other abusive practices” (178), especially if not carefully monitored.

Researchers and journalists with interests in police-racial-ethnic relations continue to link the police practices of carding / street checks to racial profiling in recent years (Gunn 2019; Okeke 2012; Rankin 2010; Wortley and Tanner 2003; Ray 2019). For instance, in October 2012, Montréal Police admitted to wrongfully tackling and arresting a young Black man perceived to be a suspect, sparking accusations of racial profiling by members of Montréal’s Black communities (Okeke 2012). Nova Scotia’s justice minister, Mark Furey, announced a permanent ban on street checks in Halifax because in October 2019, reports confirmed Black peoples were six times more likely to be street checked than their white counterparts (Ray 2019). This decision followed a careful review of the practice, concluding that “street checks are not reasonably necessary for police to execute their duties” (Ray 2019). Justice Michael Tulloch came to a similar conclusion in early 2019, following a review of the practice in Ontario (Gunn 2019). According to Justice Tulloch, random police street checks add little to no value as a law enforcement tool, and there are calls for the practice to be controlled (Gunn 2019).

In Alberta, concerns about racial profiling made news headlines in Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Edmonton, and Calgary. Defence lawyer Miranda Hlady first raised the issue of racial profiling in Lethbridge following a review of the data by Lethbridge Police Service (LPS) on carding, obtained through a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy request in 2016 (Labby 2017). News coverage of Hlady’s review data revealed that the Lethbridge Police conducted 2,264 street checks in 2015 and 2016, 455 (20 percent) of which targeted individuals who were either Black or Indigenous persons and between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five (Labby 2017). Hlady’s review further reveals Black people were nine times more likely to be street checked and asked to provide identification in the city of Lethbridge in 2015 and 2016 (Labby 2017). Jason Laurendeau (2018) argues Hlady’s review provides “convincing evidence that Indigenous peoples, [B]lack people and people of colour are disproportionately the targets of unwanted police attention” in Lethbridge (1). The societal depiction of Black youth as thugs and gangsters (Maynard 2017), among other criminal labels, may explain their unwarranted police attention in Lethbridge.

Public Safety Discourse

Stuart Hall (1997a) points to the importance of language in his discussion of the relationship between representation and culture. He defines language as sounds, words, notes, gestures, expressions, clothes, signs, and images we use to communicate. Hall indicates that language is central to meaning and culture and is a key repository of cultural values. Hall further contends that language is the medium through which we express the “thoughts, ideas and feelings [that] are represented in a culture” (1). The cultural belief in the criminality of Black peoples is often expressed through terms such as gangsters, thugs, criminals, and gang members. Hall (1997a) argues that representation starts at the point of language because we use language to externalize the meanings we are making of others and the world as we know it. Van Dijk (1991) states that the choice of one word over another to convey a message sometimes indicates the “opinions, emotions, or social positions of a speaker” (53).

Therefore, when politicians, law enforcement officials, and cultural texts (e.g., news reports) use those words in association with Blackness, it creates a negative public depiction of Black peoples and perpetuates a general fear of Blackness—the skin colour that has come to signify peoples who self-identify as Black or have African ancestry (Hall 2021). The mass media, the majority of which is controlled by white elites (Hall 1997b; Kappeler and Potter 2017; Van Dijk 1991), has often been instrumental in propagating negative images of Black peoples. In most cases, the “media representation of crime contributes to racial stereotypes” where the perpetrators are people of colour, thereby promoting a misconception of crime and the creation of the fear of, for example, Black peoples, who are perceived to be prone to criminality and violence (Kappeler and Potter 2017, 31). The images that portray Black/African Americans as “looters” after Hurricane Katrina (CNN 2016) and, most recently, images of Black peoples from the protests after George Floyd’s killing (Almaguer 2020) are some examples of how Blackness and criminality become metonymically related. Indeed, there is evidence to confirm the negative portrayal of Black peoples as prone to criminality and violence in the mass media, especially in the last two decades (Baden 2018; D’Angelo et al. 2018; Hall 1997b; Maynard 2017; Van Dijk 1991).

According to D’Angelo et al. (2018), this negative news media depiction of Black peoples is mostly because of biased news coverage and journalistic framing. Robert Entman’s (1993) work on media framing of race and crime in the 1990s influenced D’Angelo et al.’s line of thinking. Entman’s early work suggests that frames identify problems and outline causes equally. Entman argued that the framing of Blackness as criminality “was advanced specifically by news stories that increased the salience of race by focusing crime stories on blue collar offences committed by an overabundance of nameless, handcuffed Black suspects” (as cited in D’Angelo et al. 2018, 343).

Hence, this project seeks to explore how carding is represented in the mass media in Alberta since 2015. One of my objectives is to identify the political actors as depicted in the media and the persons being quoted or named in the news articles analyzed. I also wanted to identify the discursive strategies used in the context of the literature selected for analysis. Hodes (2020a) defines discursive strategies as “linguistic practices that speakers and writers use to convey meaning and messages. Often, speakers revert to different discursive strategies to maximise the impact and effect of the message and to fulfil different interests” (1). Based on this definition, this project will facilitate the creation of a different discourse to enhance our understanding of the experiences of Black peoples, particularly with regard to carding—a common form of racial profiling in Alberta. Consequently, this analysis seeks to explore whether the discursive strategies used in mass media reporting on carding / racial profiling are furthering racist discourse, attempting to gain public support for the practice, or contributing to a critique.

Method

I employed a discourse-historical approach (DHA) for this project, drawing on critical race theory to provide a theoretical lens for understanding the historical and present events that continue to shape the relationship between the police and Black people. According to Wodak and Meyer (2015), “DHA attempts to integrate a large quantity of available knowledge about the historical sources and the background [like the legacy of slavery] of the social and political fields in which discursive ‘events’ are embedded” (3). DHA is interdisciplinary; it engages theory, research practices, and practical applications, like visualizing how the practice of racism continues to impact the lives of Black people in the present. DHA seeks to “deconstruct the hegemony of specific discourse by deciphering the ideologies that serve to establish and perpetuate” it (24–25).

Nonetheless, the challenge of using this approach is that “understanding and explaining the relationship between complex historical processes and hegemonic narratives” (Wodak and Meyer 2015, 13) requires the integration of Black people’s experiences with bigotry, past and present, and reports, policy, and news reporting, among other sources. As a result, while this chapter incorporates snapshots of the broader history informing racial profiling through carding / street checks in Lethbridge, Alberta, and Canada more broadly, including governmental reports, the findings generated as a result of the news media analysis are preliminary to a larger project that will incorporate the voices of Black youth in Alberta. These preliminary findings are nevertheless revealing in terms of how media representations can shape popular understandings of racial profiling and how racial profiling is represented to the public in Lethbridge, Alberta. While carding / street checks that amount to racial profiling also affect other peoples of colour and Indigenous peoples, as research has shown, the focus on Black peoples is necessary as they are disproportionately impacted by these police practices.

Measures and Procedure

My sources for this analysis were located through a Google search, using “racial profiling” and “Alberta.” This approach allowed me to obtain both province-wide and local online news articles related to racial profiling published between 2015 and 2020. I limited the search to between these years to correspond to the period when defence attorney Miranda Hlady first drew the public’s attention to concerns about racial profiling. Hence, the corpus of data comprises sixteen articles, some of which were reprinted across the following news media sources: the Lethbridge Herald, CBC News Calgary and Edmonton, the Globe and Mail, Global News (Lethbridge), Chronicle—Herald, Halifax, N. S., the Toronto Star, the Star Edmonton, and Edmonton Journal. The data also includes news articles obtained from the Canadian Newsstream database. However, as Hodes has outlined in her contribution to this volume, a significant limitation of the articles obtained from this database is that the articles tend to be extricated from larger sources. This process then omits surrounding stories and links that contribute to the intertextual nature of news reporting and visual representations, like pictures (see Hodes in this volume).

I also searched the following databases for peer-reviewed academic articles on racial profiling: SocINDEX with Full Text, JSTOR, Sociological Abstracts, and Academic Search Complete. However, these articles were not coded for analysis. Using NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software, I then coded each news source for five discursive strategies—argumentation, individualization, normalization, predication, and referential strategies—as they emerged in my data (Hodes 2020b). Coding “is an approach to organizing qualitative data by assigning short words or phrases to identify important features”; it is a cyclical and time-consuming process (see Hodes in this volume).

Findings and Concluding Discussion

Five discursive strategies emerged as the prominent themes in the project.

The most prominent discursive strategy that appeared across news sources was argumentation. Argumentation refers to the lexical choices that social actors use to persuade readers (Reisigl 2017, 52). For instance, in the data collected here, arguments are used to justify why the practice of carding should continue or stop. The second most prominent was individualization. According to Hodes (2020a), “individualization” is a “referential strategy that refers to the social actors as individuals” (2). This strategy is often used to single people out in ways that can convey things like social class and authority in a community or, conversely, criminality, victimhood, or culpability. The third most common strategy was predication. This occurs when properties are linked to objects. When used to identify social actors, events, or actions, predication can create positive or negative characterizations and associations (Reisigl 2017, 52). For instance, when criminality is predicated on the properties of Blackness, Indigeneity, and other racialized or ethnic identities, reporting that disproportionately connects them with unsolicited police attention creates the perception that this attention is justified. This is connected to the strategy of normalization, whereby certain phenomena are naturalized or given a taken-for-granted or indisputable quality (Hodes 2020a).

For example, when carding is normalized as a necessary law enforcement approach, it becomes a desirable policing strategy instead of a racial profiling strategy that furthers systemic racism. Similar to predication and individualization, both of which are specific kinds of referential strategies, referential strategies can also more broadly “refer to ways of constructing of social actors” as part of in-groups and outgroups (Hodes 2020a, 1). Reporting on Black Lives Matter Edmonton and area chapter, Progress Alberta often relies on referential strategies that construct outgroups. My focus in this chapter will be on argumentation and normalization as it occurs in both articles and headlines to illustrate how they use these discursive strategies to support, criticize, or remain neutral in their assessments of racial profiling through police carding practices.

In analyzing argumentation strategies, I looked for the main arguments proffered by each article that either supported, critiqued, or remained neutral in its representation of racial profiling. For example, Rob Davis, former chief of police, LPS, made the following justificatory argument for why LPS could not be racist. He stated,

The Lethbridge Police Service is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies [CALEA]. CALEA was born in the U.S. and brought together the International Association of Chiefs of Police, National Organization of Black Law Enforcement, the National Sheriffs Association and the Police Executive Research Forum. [. . .] Part of why it was formed was to address race-based issues that manifested in the late 1960s and the 1970s. (Yoos 2017, 2)

In essence, the argument goes like this: Premise 1: LPS is a member of CALEA. Premise 2: CALEA was born in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, together with the Black Law Enforcement organization, to address race-based policing issues. Premise 3: “Race-based” issues “manifested in the last 1960s and the 1970s” and are therefore a thing of the past. Conclusion: The LPS is not racist / does not practice racial profiling. According to this argument, the inclusion of the Black Law Enforcement organization in the process suggests that race-based policing issues have been solved; therefore, we should not be dealing with race-based policing problems in 2020. Yet race-based policing issues are decidedly a part of the fabric of policing today. A Washington Post (2020) report shows that police have killed 1,028 African Americans in the US in the past five years, 2015–20. These killings include Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Five additional African Americans have since died in protests across US cities following Floyd’s murder (Binder 2020). Canada’s police brutality picture may be different, but it does not negate the fact police have been involved in the deaths of thirteen Black people within the same period (Cole 2020a). We live in a society where Blackness is equated with danger, and the outcomes for police-Black encounters have often been deadly, particularly when this perception intersects with an episode of mental health. Regis Korchinski-Paquet and D’Andre Campbell are among the most recent victims of fatal encounters while police were on wellness checks.

My query of the intersection between the dominant themes and selected attribute values revealed that argumentation was more substantial for articles published in Edmonton and Lethbridge between 2017 and 2020: 62 percent and 63 percent, respectively. Overall, argumentation appeared almost 56 percent of the time compared to the other dominant themes, shown in table 10.1. Note that the statistics derived from NVivo coding are meant for visualization purposes only and to show the dominant discursive strategies as coded by this writer for each of the articles analyzed for this project.

Furthermore, when coding for argumentation, I also compared arguments made in support of or against carding as a policing strategy. Results are shown in table 10.2.

Based on this query, online newspaper articles published in Lethbridge exhibited the most persuasive arguments in support of carding—54 percent—compared to those published in Edmonton: 50 percent. Here are examples of cases coded for and against carding. Chief Davis argues in support of carding in this manner: “[Carding] is a tool to gather information [. . . ; and the police officers have a] duty to public safety, crime prevention and addressing criminality and that duty does NOT see colour or race” (Lethbridge Herald 2017, A3). Defence lawyer Hlady argues against carding by stating, “The practice of stopping people and asking for information without advising them that they can refuse to answer without consequence is offensive. It’s part of an on-going systematic racist practice and an example of discrimination in our midst” (Labby 2018, 2). According to Bell (2008), race neutrality often makes it challenging to fight unconscious racism in all sectors in our society, including law enforcement. Therefore, to argue that officers do not see colour when enforcing the law idealizes a colour-blind approach to policing, thereby making it challenging to address the systemic racism that is prominent in policing and criminal justice systems more broadly. Racial profiling is one example of these practices. Racism is entrenched in our thought processes and institutions, the police included. Hence, colour-blindness does not equate to equal treatment for Black people, who are often perceived to be guilty without a charge (Delgado, Stefancic, and Harris 2017; Maynard 2017).

Additionally, presenting carding as a “tool to gather information” in the interest of a police crime prevention strategy seeks to normalize the practice by suggesting that not only is it capable of preventing crime but it is used indiscriminately. Figure 10.1 shows results from a text search query of the phrase crime prevention. Text search queries help researchers explore the use, context, and meaning of words within a corpus of data like the news sources analyzed here. For instance, the word “carding” was collocated with “play a key role in preventing and solving crimes,” shown on the second line from the bottom left of figure 10.1.

This association of carding as a useful tool for crime suppression and prevention and maintenance of public peace would consequentially garner public support of the practice as a useful policing strategy. Politicians and law enforcement officials engage in “law and order” rhetoric to establish a symbiotic relationship between the two, where crime is considered an unacceptable pathology that needs to be eliminated at all costs (Mansell, Meteyard, and Thomson 1999). In a society where Blackness is the perceived source of this pathology, the demise of Black lives then becomes the price of maintaining a so-called ordered society. The media are often instrumental in promoting politicians and law enforcement’s “law and order” rhetoric in society (Kappeler and Potter 2017).

Headlines play a critical role in news reporting, which necessitates, as Van Dijk (1991) indicates, paying attention to the interactions between words in the headlines of a project’s dataset. Doing so aids in understanding the roles and relationships between the actors represented in news stories, specifically, the police, Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and other people of colour (Van Dijk 1991, 58).

The query revealed 63 percent of the articles’ headlines represented carding negatively. The following are two examples:

However, combining the neutral and positive representation of carding in the overall corpus of articles—50 percent and 18.75 percent, respectively—suggests carding is not necessarily depicted negatively in the headlines. Also worth noting is that the word “racist” was present in only one headline and in only three articles (n = 16). Here is one example:

This headline can also be interpreted in several ways. Because the word “racist” appears in scare quotes, it lends itself to a perspective that draws racism into question, and that presents the police as victims who are falsely accused of “racist” carding practices. Putting the word “racist” in quotation marks appearing directly after the word “accused” suggests that whether carding is racist is up for debate, thereby contradicting recent studies and judicial commentary indicating that carding constitutes racial profiling and is thereby inherently racist. Such depictions not only normalize but attempt to garner public support for the police practice of carding as a crime-fighting tool to ensure public safety.

My goal for this chapter was to provide an overview of a sample of media representations of carding, an example of racial profiling in Alberta. I wanted to identify the discursive strategies that are most prominent in the context of the articles chosen for the project with the intent to determine whether the news sources are (a) furthering racist discourse, (b) attempting to garner public support for racial profiling, or (c) contributing to a critique of racial profiling. A straightforward answer to these questions would be that yes, all these things were present in my dataset. For instance, Black people, Indigenous peoples, and allies, including Hlady, in particular, have explicitly labelled carding a racist practice. Yet my dataset contained only three articles where the word “racist” itself was mentioned. The argument that carding is a tool for preventing and solving crime, and not an example of racial profiling, serves as an example of an attempt to garner public support of racial profiling. Those who challenge the practice are thereby indirectly framed as being against public safety and supporting criminals. Finally, as the dataset clearly shows, Lethbridge news media were more likely to publish articles in support of carding / racial profiling than any of the other news sources analyzed for this chapter.

Despite the presence of media representations of carding as a detrimental practice to Black people and other racial-ethnic minorities, my headline analysis suggests that the neutral and positive portrayals of carding may have very well helped the police effort to normalize the practice. Police administrators in the Alberta cities mentioned here continue to deny that carding constitutes racial profiling. Police administrators in these cities have, however, acknowledged the need for more training in this area while waiting for direction from the government of Alberta. Nonetheless, one can only address an issue when one has acknowledged that the issue exists. Carding has also been an issue in Ontario and Nova Scotia, and unlike Alberta, governmental officials in both provinces have begun taking steps to address it. The New Democratic Party (NDP) government launched a six-week, province-wide consultation on carding in Alberta in August 2017, but nothing concrete came from it. Building on the NDP’s consultation on police reform, Jason Kenney’s government began a Police Act review stakeholder engagement in fall 2020. This process includes an attempt to better understand diverse communities’ perspectives on their interactions and experiences with police and the impacts of these experiences in their daily lives (Government of Alberta, n.d.). However, results from this consultation are still under review (Government of Alberta, n.d.).

Promoting carding as an information-gathering crime prevention strategy is rooted in the historical impetus behind policing in England: to control unwanted populations. This is a model that informs the development of policing in both the US and Canada today (see Özcan in this volume). In the context of the news sources discussed here, the discursive strategies outlined in this chapter create a predominant perception of carding / racial profiling as a practice that is neutral, in the interests of crime prevention, and normalized, despite the media sources, both academic and non-academic studies, that clearly outline its disproportionate impact on Black peoples. Unfortunately, those sources that actively support the practice were predominantly found in local, Lethbridge media, signalling a need for greater attention to be paid to racism in policing in Sothern Alberta.

References