Carding policies questioned

PROVINCIAL GOV’T WANTS FEEDBACK FROM CITIZENS

It’s an activity that’s been defended by police chiefs across the nation. But stopping and “carding” pedestrians on city streets has come under widespread criticism. And now the provincial government is checking with Albertans to ask if it has a place in community policing.

Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley has announced a consultation process involving scores of groups across the province. She’s proposing guidelines “to standardize” when and how police services including the RCMP conduct and document those on-the-street interactions.

But she wants to hear ordinary Albertans’ experiences with carding.

“Our hope is to get as many people who have been affected as possible,” she told reporters.

“People are often reluctant to come forward and share their experiences.”

An Edmonton report earlier this summer — much like data from Ontario — showed black residents of the capital city were three to five times more likely to be carded than Caucasians. Aboriginal women were nine times more likely than their white neighbours.

In Lethbridge, a defence lawyer released similar statistics, showing blackskinned residents here are eight times more likely to be carded than whites. Aboriginal residents are five times more likely.

Branding the Edmonton numbers “troubling,” the justice minister proposed a province-wide review. Recently, she laid out plans for the review. It will come more than a year after a sweeping review of the matter in Ontario.

Ganley wants to learn more about the many “non-arrest, non-detention interactions in which the police ask for and receive personal information,” she said.

She’s not looking to block “the ability for the police to interact with anyone who is not detained, because that’s the basis of community policing,” she added.

About 100 groups across the province will be consulted, officials say, including Native Counselling Services, crime prevention groups, lawyers’ associations, Muslim and civic officials. Contacted by the Lethbridge Herald, they were unable to say which southern Alberta groups would be invited to respond.

Draft guidelines will be created after the groups’ responses are received — they’re being given six weeks — but officials could not indicate how individual Albertans would be able to be heard in the initial or follow-up stages.

“I’m happy to see something is going to be done,” said Miranda Hlady, the lawyer who raised the issue in Lethbridge. “But who will be consulted? Who won’t be?”

Young people’s voices won’t likely be heard, she predicted. Issues involving immigrants and disabled citizens could also be overlooked.

Hlady reported she continues to hear from Lethbridge residents who have been carded repeatedly, for no apparent reason.

“Why do they keep doing this,” she asked. “People feel violated.”

While the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police has voiced support for the review, several members have expressed reservations.

“We don’t have to set up another set of regulations and guidelines,” said Medicine Hat chief Andy McGrogan, the association’s president.

“If we do it respectfully and with dignity to all, and we gather that information for the purpose that we’ve collected it, we’re dumbfounded to understand what the issues are.”

Earlier this year, Lethbridge chief Rob Davis defended the “street checks” as “essentially a field interview that results in the completion of a street check information report — an intelligence gathering tool.”

They’re conducted, he said, with “individuals observed under suspicious circumstances, or if the nature of the actions and presence in an area raises the possibility of criminal activity.”

An analyst for the Lethbridge police department was asked to conduct a comprehensive analysis, he added, because the data released under Alberta’s freedom of information laws “was not sufficient to do the calculations that were done and as a result, the numbers are skewed.”

In Coaldale meanwhile, RCMP Sgt. Glenn Henry told town council his officers are conducting street checks in hopes of reducing property crimes.

He described it as “challenging people that are in our community who may not lawfully be here.”

“It’s good to track those people because we may catch them later, in a different part of town, and maybe link some thefts to these people.”