Police carding is not over
Last week, the Wynne government announced draft regulations meant to herald in a new era in policing in Ontario. The proposed rules would mean the “end of carding,” Queen’s Park proclaimed. No longer would people be subject to discriminatory street checks by police.
I was immediately suspicious. How can a government regulate a practice it is eliminating? Frustration soon turned to dull, familiar rage as I read the new policies.
Carding is not over, and nothing in the draft regulations will prevent the statusquo discriminatory and disproportionate criminalization of black Ontarians.
On the face of it, the regulations would prohibit police from stopping and questioning people based on race (with significant exceptions). They also state that being present in a “high crime neighbourhood” cannot be the sole reason for a street check (this doesn’t scream progress to me). But let’s be honest: these rules are nothing new. There are already laws in existence meant to prevent racist policing.
Here’s what’s in the fine print: police are not to stop people based on their race, unless race is an important identifying factor in the police’s search for a particular individual. In other words, carding can still happen to you — if you fit a certain description. Sadly, this is almost always the excuse used to criminalize black people.
Also in the fine print: if an officer collects information from an individual in a manner that violates the regulation, there is no consequence to the officer, no recourse for the carded individual and the identifying information is retained in the police database. In other words, police can continue to card with impunity.
The policy will also do nothing to elim- inate the abundant cache of identifying information that has been collected throughout the years — one of the central issues activists have been seeking to solve.
In a laughably out-of-touch stipulation, the draft regulations dictate that subjects of a street check must volunteer to engage with the police. Again: this is not new. Currently, police are not able to force you to give them identifying information, or to interact with them barring an arrest. But it’s important to remember that these are interactions characterized by a significant power imbalance. Contact between a community that is hyperaware of its criminalization and lack of access to justice (see Jermaine Carby or Andrew Loku, among others) and uniformed, armed individuals who rarely ever see any sort of penalty for wrongdoing cannot be said to be truly voluntary. Instead, for the vulnerable side of the equation, it is necessarily run through with fear.
Another shortcoming of the draft policy is that it doesn’t contemplate the Special Investigations Unit, which probes police conduct. The vast majority of cases sent to the SIU end up protecting officers and denying victims the chance to have their experiences adjudicated in a court of law — in other words, the unit tends to reinforce, rather than redress, anti-black racism in policing.
The SIU is also secretive in its dealings with civilians. Recently, I attempted to reach someone at the SIU to talk about their processes. They refused to respond to phone calls and emails. So I tried a Freedom of Information request. But the SIU claims they are exempt from FOIs, even though the law doesn’t seem to support this. After days on the phone being transferred from office to office, no government official could verify whether the SIU was exempt from FOIs, or where I should submit a request for information.
If the Wynne government is serious about wanting to address anti-black racism in policing, here are some things they should do: 1. Eliminate carding, full stop. 2. Start collecting race-based statistics on a system-wide level. The regulations mandate the collection of statistics, but in categories set up by the chief of police. Let’s collect the data in a rigorous manner not designed by those with an interest in preserving the status quo.
3. Overhaul the SIU and make information available to the public. In the name of accountability, we should make public the names of officers involved in problematic interactions as well as their history of infractions. U.S. citizens have access to this information and so should we.
The public has a short period to respond to the draft regulations.
These proposed rules should be widely panned and something more should be demanded in their place: the true elimination of carding. We need to be honest, targeted and direct about what we are trying to do: eliminate anti-black racism and racism in general from policing. Toothless political band-aids won’t get the job done or restore dignity to black people affected by racist policing across Ontario.
Toothless political band-aids won’t get the job done or restore dignity to black people affected by racist policing across Ontario