Police should record the ethnicity of suspects they come into contact with in order to help eliminate racism, say advocates for ethnic minority communities.

Ten years ago, keeping race statistics was blamed for racial profiling and largely abolished.

But many people spoke out in favour of such statistics at a forum on Friday intended to improve relations between Ottawa police and the city's Somali, Jamaican, Haitian and Trinidadian communities.

Scott Wortley, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, said such statistics are necessary to find out whether members of ethnic minorities are being disproportionately targeted or treated unfairly within the criminal justice system.

Wortley, one of about 40 people who attended the forum, said members of ethnic minority groups sometimes complain that they are pulled over more often or receive stiffer sentences than the general population — something that authorities typically deny.

"Without such monitoring, we don't really know what's going on," he added.

Race information commonly kept in other countries

Wortley said race statistics are widely used by police in Europe and the U.S., but not in Canada. That's because minority groups complained in the past that such statistics were used to show certain ethnic groups had a greater tendency to commit crimes, he said.

But Margaret Parsons, a spokeswoman for the African Canadian Legal Clinic, suggested that today, it is the authorities who don't want to make the statistics available because the numbers might serve as proof that they are treating some groups unfairly.

"Whether it's the government, whether it's school boards, whether it's law enforcement institutions, I think they're hiding behind that shield of not collecting data in order that we don't see effective change."

When asked whether Ottawa police planned to start keeping race-based statistics, spokesman David Pepper said the force would be open to any strategy that might help eliminate racism.

The forum was part of a two-year community-police race relations project funded by Heritage Canada.