Police body cameras won’t record ‘carding’

Tor o nt o police officers equipped with body cameras as part of a pilot project rolling out this month won’t be recording when they “card” citizens not under arrest or investigation, a police spokesperson said Monday.

It’s a restriction one activist dubs “absolutely laughable,” and one that hints at the tough choices the force may face as it seeks to balance policing and privacy with calls for greater transparency.

The one-year trial, prompted in part by the shooting death of teenager Sammy Yatim, will see 100 officers from four units wearing the cameras on shift, starting May 18. The body-mounted devices won’t be on at all times, though.

Officers will turn on the cameras “prior to arriving at a call for service or when they start investigating an individual,” according to the police. They’ll turn them off “when the call for service or investigation is complete” or when the officer determines the recording is no longer serving its intended purpose.

That policy means most instances of carding — perhaps the most contentious issue in Toronto policing at the moment — will go unrecorded during the trial.

That doesn’t please Andray Domise, who ran for city council last year and has since emerged as a leading critic on race and policing in Toronto.

“That’s almost comical to me,” he said. The whole idea of body cameras, Domise believed, was to take the ambiguity out of police interactions with the public. If officers can pick and choose when the cameras roll, that makes the whole process “completely pointless,” he said.

Domise said he’s not a fan of police cameras necessarily, but if they are to be used, he said, they should be used universally.

Carding, whereby officers stop people not under arrest or investigation and record their information in a database, has come under intense fire in the last year. Activists say it overwhelmingly targets young black men and amounts to racial profiling or outright racism by the police.

Police Chief Mark Saunders has been dogged by questions on carding since he was first announced as the city’s new top cop last month. He has repeatedly implied in interviews that the practice is an important tool for fighting gangs and protecting public safety.

Asked if carding incidents would be filmed during the body camera trial, police spokeswoman Meaghan Gray replied: “Carding means different things to different people.

“If you’re talking about an investigative detention or an arrest, that would be part of that investigative nature. But the community engagements that we’re talking about or the informal interactions that we have with the public, no, it’s not turned on.”

Carding is what police used to call “community engagements,” said Toronto lawyer Peter Rosenthal, an outspoken carding critic, in an email.

“In my view, it is particularly important that videos record carding by officers. If carding takes place (which it shouldn’t, in my opinion), the officer’s behaviour should be reviewable,” he wrote.

Gray said the officers involved in the trial have received intensive training on when and why to turn on their cameras. Once shot, the footage cannot be altered by the officers involved, or their supervisors, according to the department’s published policy. Nor can it be accessed, reviewed, edited or deleted at the time of recording.

Once back at the station, officers will place their cameras in a porting dock where the videos will be automatically uploaded to a secure sever. All the footage and related data will be stored for a minimum of one year. In cases where charges are laid, the footage will be treated like any other evidence and turned over to the defence.

Not every officer in the units involved in the trial — the anti-gang TAVIS team, traffic services and the east end 55 and 43 divisions — will be equipped with a camera. Data on everything from use of force, to arrests, complaints and all other basic police statistics will be recorded for those wearing cameras and compared to that of the camera-less officers in the same units, Gray wrote in an email.

The trial, budgeted at $500,000, will begin just less than nine months after retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci recommended the force adopt body cameras in a review prompted by Yatim’s death.

The Toronto teen was shot to death in a streetcar by Const. James Forcillo in the summer of 2013. Forcillo was later charged with second-degree murder.