A new course which will be offered at the University of Toronto this spring will allow students to analyze the public health implications of race-based criminal justice data in real-time –just as governments in Canada are releasing the information.

The course will explore the ways in which Canada’s criminal justice system “intersects with race, poverty, gender and mental health to create compounded intersectional risks for Black Canadians – and considers how racism and over-policing have undermined Black trust and confidence in the Canadian justice system, ”  says U of T News.

It  will also apply an anti-racist lens to public health approaches to Black gun violence and homicide victimization in Toronto by querying whether public health has effectively dealt with a long-standing racialized epidemic of homicide mortality in Toronto.

“The framing that the course brings to the issues is distinct,” said Akwatu Khenti.  an assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, who will help students build the analytical skills needed to use publicly available data to answer critical public health questions, with the goal of understanding barriers to an equitable criminal justice system.

“We will examine the issues through the Black community’s crisis of trust in policing, which is at its lowest ebb in Ontario right now, the crisis in police credibility due to the persistence of racial profiling, and the public health crisis resulting from police violence that manifests – not just in gun deaths, but in mental health consequences,” Khenti noted.