Police strip searches under investigation
There’s no regard given to rules, independent police director says
A Ghanaian man with limited English was forced to stand naked from the waist down after three Toronto officers performed an unlawful public strip search in broad daylight.
A Toronto beat cop testifying in court that he strip searched “hundreds” of people naked, wrongly believing it was standard procedure.
An unconstitutional search by an officer who forced a man to drop his pants, prompting an Ontario judge to call out “troubling systemic issues” with strip searches at one Toronto police division.
Despite a 15-year-old Supreme Court ruling declaring strip searches “inherently humiliating and degrading” and setting strict limits on when they can be performed, unlawful strip searches continue in Ontario — prompting tossed criminal charges, civil lawsuits and complaints to the province’s police watchdogs.
So many cases of unjustified strip searches have been brought to the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) that Gerry McNeilly announced Tuesday he is using his office’s greatest power to launch a systemic, provincewide review of police strip search policies and practices.
“I’ve had enough,” McNeilly, the independent police director, said in an interview Tuesday. “There is no regard being given to the rules.”
The systemic review — only the fourth initiated by the OIPRD — is the culmination of a years-long pursuit by McNeilly and other critics to see officers follow the law set by the 2001Supreme court case.
The landmark ruling states strip searches can only be conducted when there are reasonable grounds, such as looking for evidence related to an arrest or weapons. The searches cannot be employed “routinely,” Canada’s highest court ruled.
Nonetheless, Toronto police statistics show strip searches were performed 20,152 times in 2013 — one out of every three arrests.
Meanwhile, evidence such as drugs was located in just over 1 per cent of those searches. Former police chief Bill Blair, however, said objects that could harm suspects or police officers, or could be used to escape, were found in 43 per cent of those searches.
But critics say Toronto officers have for too long been allowed to perform strip searches with unjustifiable frequency. In his 2012 report on mass arrests at Toronto’s G20 summit, retired judge John Morden called for an investigation into the high rate of “invasive” strip searches.
The Toronto Police Services Board, too, attempted to rein in employment of strip searches, calling for random spot checks at all 17 police divisions to see how and when the searches were approved and performed. That review — which examined “level 3” searches, which involve removing all or some of a person’s clothing — ultimately found every strip search performed over a twomonth period in 2014 was “justified and lawful,” according to then-police chief Bill Blair.
McNeilly, too, appealed to Toronto police to re-examine how frequently officers employed strip searches. In 2013, he wrote a letter to Blair, saying he was “deeply troubled by what appears to be a general overuse of strip searches” by his officers.
AToronto police spokesperson said Tuesday that the service would not be commenting on McNeilly’s announcement that he is launching a systemic review of strip searches. Blair has previously defended Toronto police policies on strip searches, saying the force has policies restricting and accounting for the use of strip searches, including requiring that officers videotape their orders to perform a strip search (the searches themselves are not videotaped).
On Tuesday, McNeilly said the overreliance on the searches is far from a Toronto problem; he has sent similar letters to other police chiefs. But it was to no avail, he said, as shown by the growing number of complaints and the frequency of judicial findings of unconstitutional searches.
“Enough police services across the province are either not totally aware of (the Supreme court decision), or policies are not being followed, or policies may not be in place,” he said. “I can tell you that I have come across situations where some small services really don’t have policies.”
The first step of the systemic review will be requesting and reviewing individual police services’ policies and practices — or lack thereof. The reviewers will also examine the training given to officers, both within each force and at the Ontario Police College, where all officers receive basic training. McNeilly said he also hopes to interview some of the complainants who have brought their concerns about police strip searches to the OIPRD over the years.
The agency will then release a re- port with recommendations.
Jonathan Rosenthal, a Toronto criminal lawyer who has been practicing criminal law for nearly 30 years, says he is “cautiously optimistic” about McNeilly’s review. But he says it will be difficult to tackle a system-wide problem of police ignoring the Supreme Court ruling.
“(The ruling) was 15 years ago, and you still have police that don’t seem to have any concept of what their constitutional obligations are,” he said. Created in 2009, the OIPRD investigates complaints about police in Ontario, but has the power to initiate a systemic review of issues affecting policing provincewide.
The agency’s first systemic review produced a scathing report on police actions during the G20. Last month, the agency released the results of another systemic review, examining an incident involving the OPP’s collection of DNA from migrant workers in Elgin County. The OIPRD is still conducting its systemic review into police use of force prompted by the Toronto police shooting death of Sammy Yatim, and it is expected to officially announce a systemic review into police officer mental health and suicides later this year. Wendy Gillis can be reached at wgillis@thestar.ca