The right call on carding
In recommending an end to police carding, Toronto Mayor John Tory has made the right decision. Carding — the systematic stopping, interviewing and documenting of people who are committing no crime and display no evidence of having committed a crime — has outlived whatever usefulness it may once have had as a tool of law and order.
In order to better understand the simmering resentment carding has inspired, particularly in Toronto, it’s helpful to turn the argument around. What is the rationale for it? What good can it do, in the best case?
One could argue police are only as effective as the depth of their understanding of the communities in which they serve. Police investigations rely on testimony, which is built initially on tips. And these can only come about through interaction between police officers and people — not adversarial, but helpful and mutually respectful. Properly applied, carding could conceivably have fostered this.
Moreover, proponents of carding, such as Toronto chief of police Mark Saunders, argue the very presence of officers in a community contributes to law and order. The regular streetlevel exchanges are a means for police to get to know and stay connected with their beats. Documenting the exchange, some argue, ensures the outreach isn’t wasted if, for example, a police officer is transferred or replaced.
It’s a reasonable line of argument. But it no longer holds water, given how carding has been practically applied in Toronto. Multiple investigations and inquiries have shown the practice has been used by police to collect information disproportionately on young black males, in a ratio three or four times higher than their share of the population.
No one disputes these figures, that we are aware of. Indeed, anecdotal evidence tends to support them. In a recent issue of Toronto Life magazine, journalist Desmond Cole, who is black, writes of having been stopped and interrogated by police more than 50 times in his life — as far as he can tell, for no reason other than the colour of his skin. The practice of carding has become inextricably intertwined with systematic racial profiling.
Beyond that, there is the issue of a person’s right in a free society not to be interfered with by an agent of the state, without just cause. For vehicular stops, the standard is reasonable grounds to suspect an infraction has taken place. (Roadblocks to dissuade drunk drivers are an exception, which has been allowed by the Supreme Court of Canada.) In principle, carding is no different from a random vehicular stop by a police officer, based on no evidence — or, worse, a not-so-random stop, based on the “evidence” that the driver was black.
Community outreach by police is necessary and worthwhile. But a program of unwarranted stops and documented interrogation, especially given its tendency to disproportionately target members of particular racial or ethnic groups, is unlikely to enhance relationships and ease communication. Police are always free to strike up conversations on the beat, and should be encouraged to do so. But stopping and interrogating people at random, then filing their names in a database — this will have to go.
If Toronto were Gotham, beset by unbridled mayhem, the argument of necessity might be more compelling, intrusiveness notwithstanding. But no such crime wave exists. Indeed, violent crime in Canada has been steadily on the wane since the early 1990s, and in 2013, hit a 40-year-low. That long-term trend is roughly mirrored in Toronto.
The solution is therefore inescapable. The mayor was right to give both sides a hearing on the issue. He was right to consider whether carding might have been overhauled in a way that mitigated community concerns. And he is right to have concluded that it cannot. It is time, as he says, “to start over.”