Law prof urges police to collect race data during street checks

If Saskatoon police officers insist on performing street checks, they must start keeping track of the ethnicity of the people they stop, argues a University of Saskatchewan law professor.

“The apparently long-standing practice not to do so simply allows the numbers of marginalized people stopped by the police to remain invisible,” Glen Luther said in a letter issued to the Saskatoon Board of Police Commissioners.

“It is essential that this statistic be collected for accountability purposes.”

Street checks — colloquially referred to as carding — are a controversial police practice in which officers stop people on the street, typically in high-crime areas at night, and question them.

Minority groups have raised concern that they are unfairly targeted by officers.

Carding became a hot-button issue in Saskatoon in 2015 after a Globe and Mail article revealed Saskatoon had the highest carding rate of all the cities that provided data to the newspaper.

That article used 2014 data, when Saskatoon police officers logged 4,475 street checks. There was no information about the ethnicities of people stopped.

Since the Globe article was published, Luther and his colleagues have been consulting with community members about street checks as part of research funded by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission and the University of Saskatchewan.

Luther admits it may be difficult to collect race data on people stopped at street checks because people stopped by police have no obligation to talk to officers, including answering questions about their ethnicity.

“We don’t know whether people will answer these questions or not. They’re not required to answer those questions. But I think it is good policy for the commission to know who is being stopped by these street checks and I think that would be a very helpful statistic,” Luther said.

The Saskatchewan Police Commission released a policy this summer stating that police cannot randomly stop people on the street and ask for information.

The policy further specifies that street checks cannot be performed based “solely” on a person’s race.

Luther says this policy does not go far enough to prevent police from targeting marginalized groups — and he wants Saskatoon police to start collecting the data to prove or disprove that.

Following the release of the provincial street check policy, the Saskatoon Board of Police Commissioners conducted a survey asking people and groups to weigh in on the new policy. Of the 22 people or groups who took the two-question survey this summer, 86 per cent said they’d had no concerns about the impact on individual privacy prior to the provincial guidelines being announced; 68 per cent said the provincial guidelines sufficiently address any concerns they may have about the effect street checks have on individual privacy rights.

Those results and Luther’s letter will be shared with the Saskatoon Board of Police Commissioners at its meeting on Thursday.