Law union vows court action over carding
Human Rights Commission increases pressure to restore rights language to policy
Legal experts and community activists are vowing to go to court to challenge the revised policy for carding — now called “community engagements” — if it is passed by the Toronto Police Services Board at a meeting Thursday.
“After three years of hard work on the part of community groups, community members, law groups, civil liberties (groups) and the human rights commission, the board has let those groups down by abandoning its policy, with no other route but direct action,” said Howard Morton, a lawyer with the Law Union of Ontario.
He was speaking at a Tuesday press conference organized by the Osgoode Society Against Institutional Injustice.
The union has drafted and will file an application for a judicial review in divisional court if the citizen rights safeguards that were part of the board’s initial policy, approved a year ago, are not reintroduced. The Ontario Human Rights Commission is also worried about the missing rights language. In a letter Tuesday to police Chief Bill Blair, it announced the organization is not willing to consult with the service again until the protections are reintroduced.
“We believe that these recent events are an impediment to our continued engagement with you on this issue — until there is clear evidence of a willingness by the TPS to make substantive change to the procedure to deal with the corrosive effects of racial profiling,” wrote Ruth Goba, interim chief commissioner, in a letter to Blair.
The board has been harshly criticized for removing language from its original policy because Blair refused to write procedures to put it into practice, citing operational concerns.
That policy, passed in April 2014, said among other things that police could only “card” when investigating for a specific public safety purpose, and that they were required to tell individuals they stop in non-criminal encounters, as much as possible, that they have a right to leave.
Blair suspended carding altogether on Jan. 1, but never wrote the procedures.
Even police board chair Alok Mukherjee said at a news conference that he believes, like many activists, that the controversial practice may have gone underground.
Many activists at Tuesday’s news conference laid the blame at John Tory’s feet, noting that the mayor has referred to the revised policy as “a work in progress.”
Last week, Mukherjee was hoping to get the revised policy approved at a special meeting, one of the last before Blair’s contract runs out, and then review carding in six months to fix Blair’s procedures, which the chief finally wrote after the board revised the policy.
The procedures allow police to card in broadly defined scenarios and they have none of the rights-based language sought by so many.
But the board delayed a vote until this week’s regular police board meeting, after more than two dozen angry and disappointed individuals, lawyers, activists and civil rights organizations spoke against the revised policy.
In the interim, Blair was asked to consult with a joint police-community advisory committee — called PACER — to determine what details police would continue to record during carding, which he assured the board last week would include race. He is to report back to the board with the details this week.
It’s not known what that report will contain. The PACER advisory committee met April 7, but so many members were angry about the revised policy there was little discussion of the details.
The human rights commission, which has a mandate to “make recommendations on any provision, program or policy that in (the Commission’s) opinion is inconsistent with the intent” of the Human Rights Code, has made recommendations that the TPS has ignored.
The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario sent a letter April 2 to Mukherjee on key issues that needed to be resolved.
One was a requirement that police inform people of their rights. Another was destruction of personal information in the police database that doesn’t conform to privacy legislation, which the service isn’t entitled to collect in the first place. How much is there isn’t known.
But those requirements, too, have been ignored by the police service after an offer went out to meet and discuss handling of such information, according to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.
“To date, we have not been provided with dates for such a meeting or otherwise consulted on this issue.”