National Post (National Edition)
Carding has little value: judge
Report suggests police practice be severely limited
TORONTO • Police street checks widely known as carding have little to no value as a law enforcement tool and should be significantly limited across Ontario, concludes a judge who reviewed the practice.
The report from Justice Michael Tulloch outlines certain circumstances in which police may have legitimate grounds to conduct street checks, or stop people at random and request identifying information.
But Tulloch, who was appointed by Ontario’s previous Liberal government to assess the effectiveness of new regulations meant to limit the impact of street checks on racial groups, said those circumstances are very specific and the practice as a whole should be sharply curtailed.
“There is little to no evidence that a random, unfocused collection of identifying information has benefits that outweigh the social cost of the practice,” Tulloch wrote in his 310-page report released Monday.
“Given the social cost involved with a practice that has not definitively been shown to widely reduce or solve crime, it is recommended that the practice of randomly stopping individuals to gather their identifying information for the creation of a database for intelligence purposes be discontinued.”
Tulloch, who previously led a review into Ontario’s complex police oversight system, was asked to turn his attention to carding months after the previous government made moves to eliminate what it described as systemic racism in law enforcement.
Street checks started coming under intense scrutiny several years ago amid data showing officers were disproportionately stopping black people.
In 2016, Ontario introduced rules dictating that police must inform people that they don’t have to provide identifying information during street checks, and that refusing to co-operate or walking away cannot then be used as reasons to compel information.
The aim was to end arbitrary stops, especially those based on race, though anti-carding advocates have called for the practice to be abolished entirely.
Race is prohibited as forming any part of a police officer’s reason for attempting to collect someone’s identifying information.
Police had long argued that street checks have value as an investigative tool, a notion Tulloch challenged in his report.
Tulloch’s report also debunked the notion that carding had played a role in solving the high-profile killing of Cecilia Zhang, a nine-yearold girl who was abducted from her Toronto home in the middle of the night in 2003.