A welcome crackdown

It’s been 15 years since the Supreme Court declared that strip searches are “inherently humiliating and degrading.” In its landmark ruling, the court set strict limits on how they could be performed, going as far as to suggest that Parliament consider forcing police to obtain warrants before strip-searching subjects.

That never happened. Still, the court did order important restrictions to ensure strip searches are as rare and as little invasive as possible. The court ruled, for instance, that such searches must not be employed “routinely.” Police require reasonable grounds. And when strip searches are justified, the subject cannot be stripped completely naked. Instead, items of clothing must be removed one at a time, examined, and then returned to be put back on.

These rules are crucial checks on a highly invasive police practice. But frequent complaints to the province’s watchdogs and numerous troubling cases that have come to public attention in recent years suggest they are all too often being disregarded by Ontario police forces.

How bad is it? Gerry McNeilly, director of the Office of the Independent Police Review, says “there is no regard being given to the rules” — and he’s “had enough.” McNeilly is launching a systemic, province-wide review of police strip search polices and practices. It’s about time. Consider the Toronto officer who testified in court that he stripped hundreds of subjects, searching them while they were completely naked, believing it was standard procedure.

Or a case against a12-year-old boy who brought a gun and ammunition to a Toronto elementary school, which was thrown out of court by a judge because the boy had been left fully naked for a period of time in contravention of his charter rights.

Or the legal challenge that Toronto resident Megan Anoquot, an indigenous woman who has been strip searched more than once, brought against Toronto police alleging that they employ a “stereotypical approach and systematically strip search Aboriginals rather than engaging in a case-by-case basis.” (Indeed, the Supreme Court found back in 2001 that strip searches were used disproportionately against visible minorities.)

Or retired judge John W. Morden’s 2012 report on mass arrests of mostly innocent people at the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto that called for an investigation into the high incidence of invasive strip searches.

Or the numbers of strip searches conducted by Toronto police. As recently as 2013 they were performed 20,152 times, or in one out of every three arrests in Toronto. That’s disturbing, even if it was down from 2010 when strip searches were conducted in fully 60 per cent of arrests. The list, sadly, goes on and on. The Supreme Court has ruled that strip searches should be rare. They are not. That should be cause for alarm on its own, never mind the disgraceful manner in which some of these searches are handled. The findings of the planned review cannot come soon enough.