When Dickson first justified affirmative action in Canadian law C.N.R. v. Canada (Human Rights Commission), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 1114, as is typical of Dickson, he did so in modest terms with a modest justification and a modest (meaning achievable) goal:
An employment equity program, such as the one ordered by the Tribunal in the present case, is designed to break a continuing cycle of systemic discrimination. The goal is not to compensate past victims or even to provide new opportunities for specific individuals who have been unfairly refused jobs or promotion in the past, although some such individuals may be beneficiaries of an employment equity scheme. Rather, an employment equity program is an attempt to ensure that future applicants and workers from the affected group will not face the same insidious barriers that blocked their forebears. (emphasis added at 1143)
Later academic justifications for affirmative action usually assert positive outcomes more ‘efficient’ than Dickson’s mundane desire merely to break a cycle (see Garner). In United States policing, affirmative was imposed in several places in the mid 1970’s by activist courts driven by speculative theories that policing outcomes would improve with court imposed quota hiring (see Garner).
There has now been more than three decades to empirically compare quota-imposed police outcomes as against police department crime statistics where no quotas were imposed. The latest review of data is given by Garner, M., et al., Estimating Effects of Affirmative Action in Policing: A Replication and Extension, International Review of Law and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irle.2019.10588.
The below chart shows the court-imposed quota locations against police forces without court imposed quota.
The results are shown in the following (log) graphs. None of the lines on the four graphs significantly differ from zero. Zero (meaning no difference in policing outcomes) is within one standard deviation of each comparison result. It means there is no difference in policing outcomes, as between court-imposed quota and other police departments without court-imposed quotas.
The ultimate take-away: is that whatever quotas did do (Dickson) they did not produce more ‘efficient’ police outcomes.
