No plans to abolish carding: new police chief
It came, it must be said, with no little anticipation. He is the boss now, after all, and this is, for the moment, his defining issue. So when Police Chief Mark Saunders walked to the podium Wednesday, at a summit on black issues in Toronto, you could hear a quiet hum of expectation in the air. It didn’t last long. Chief Saunders, new to the job and already under fire, pleased precisely no one Wednesday when he refused, once again, to denounce the controversial practice of carding when offered the chance.
“It wasn’t that what we were doing was catastrophic,” he said about carding after the event. “It’s that there was room for improvement. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re in the process of improving how we do our job.”
In his brief address to the Second African Canadian Summit, held at the headquarters of the Ontario Federation of Labour, Saunders avoided the word “carding” entirely.
Instead, he spoke of training and conversations and community leadership. In remarks that lasted less than three minutes, he acknowledged that “African-Canadians have a completely different experience living here in Canada.” He called the Toronto Police Service an “inclusive” service. “That means that we have to treat everybody fairly,” he said.
It was only afterward, in the Q&A, that the real issue emerged. Carding — the police practice of stopping people not under arrest and recording their information — has come to stand as a kind of totem for the larger, fraught relationship between police and black men in Toronto.
Studies have found that young black men are disproportionately likely to be carded in the city; activists have long called for the practice to be abolished.
The issue gained new currency last week when Desmond Cole, a local journalist, published a piece in Toronto
Life magazine detailing his own experiences with the po- lice. “I have been stopped, if not always carded, at least 50 times by the police in Toronto, Kingston and across southern Ontario,” Cole wrote.
At the summit Wednesday, Saunders stuck to the message he first articulated last week, when he was introduced as the new chief. Community safety, he said, remains his No. 1 concern, although he vowed to limit what he called Wednesday the “social costs” of carding.
When an audience member told him that “community safety” was a code word in her community for “over-policing,” he replied that change wouldn’t happen overnight.
Afterward, speaking to re- porters, Saunders defended carding as a key investigative tool. “The introduction of this particular act became very important once we realized that there was a street gang subculture in the city of Toronto,” he said. “If we get rid of it, then we are in a situation where there will be a loss of intelligence.”
Asked specifically what would happen if carding was banned, Saunders replied: “If we removed the ability of our officers to engage with the community, all I can tell you is it will put us in a situation where there will be an increase in crime.”
A new city policy on carding, adopted by the police ser- vices board in April, is subject to mandatory review after six months. The policy, which stripped away safeguards proposed in an earlier draft, allows police to stop citizens without telling them they’re free to go unless they specifically ask. It also removed an earlier requirement for police to hand out receipts to anyone they card.
At the summit Wednesday, Mayor John Tory, who sits on the police services board, defended the process that led to the new policy.
“I completely accept the fact that the system as has been ... frequently produced unjust, discriminatory consequences for black young people in par- ticular,” he said. But when he came into office five months ago, he added, there was effectively no carding policy at all.
“The policy we recently approved was not only the best we could do at that time, but it was better than no oversight, no policy and procedure,” he said.
As for what will happen after the six-month review, Saunders appeared to rule out at least one potential option.
“Abolishing it,” he said, “is not the way in which we’re going to say ‘everything is going to be better.’”