How can you tell a country has a major problem with police who racially profile citizens?
Young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than their white counterparts. They’re more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police as white people.
Oh, and black people now threatening to move to Canada, an action previously exclusive to white people whenever they are presented with a situation that seems unreasonable to them.
Seriously, the situation South of the Border is so unnerving that an African-American man, Kyle Canty, has appeared before Canada’s immigration and refugee board in Vancouver to request refugee status after facing harassment and undue targeting by police in all seven states he’s lived in.
His argument is that he belongs to a vulnerable minority that is “being exterminated at an alarming rate” in his homeland, which technically makes him eligible under Canada’s requirements for refugee resettlement from abroad.
Though Canada admits less than 10 refugees from the United States per year, Canty’s case has been described as “well-prepared,” by one member of the refugee review board. It includes several point-of-view videos of interactions with police and other evidence of petty arrests, like jaywalking, disorderly conduct, and issuing threats, that have tarnished his name.
If Canty’s asylum status is denied, he will have to return to the U.S. to face these charges, which will probably be met with the life imprisonment that usually accompanies such infractions of minor scale committed by black people.
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