Up to Chief to stop carding
Earlier this month, Mayor John Tory finally arrived at the correct position on carding: that the practice, which he defined in a motion to the Police Services Board this week as “the random stopping of citizens not engaged in or suspected of criminal activity for the purposes of gathering information” and “the recording by (police) service members of those engagements and the retention of that information,” must cease.
Well for heaven’s sake, read that again. Of course, it must cease. And at Thursday’s board meeting, policy-wise, carding so defined suffered a serious blow. Under the terms of the 2014 “community contacts” policy, which the board re-adopted, officers “may only initiate and record contacts that serve a valid public safety purpose” — i.e., “investigating” or “preventing” a “specific offence,” or “ensuring … the subject of the contact is not at risk” and not, say, “gathering personal information for use in unspecified future investigation” or “meeting a quota or performance target.”
“At risk” is awfully vague, notes Anthony Morgan of the African Canadian Legal Clinic. And he has other quibbles: the policy says “community members (must) know as much as possible in the circumstances about their right to leave and the reason for the contact.” “In the circumstances”? Also vague. And while officers must provide receipts to contacts “identifying (them) by name and badge number and reason for the contact” — which tends to dramatically reduce the number of stops — it doesn’t give contacts access to officers’ notes.
Overall, however, anticarding advocates at the meeting were heartened. “There are a couple of flaws in the 2014 policy,” says Howard Morton of the Law Union of Ontario, “but it is a really good step forward.”
This debate certainly isn’t over. The province has said it will implement its own carding regulations; until it does, Chief Mark Saunders told reporters, this is an interim situation. And in any event, we’re talking about policy. Reality is a different beast. “The board controls policy, the chief controls operational decisions,” Morgan notes. And Saunders wasn’t exactly singing the policy’s praises on Thursday. “I’ve always said that if things are done properly, (carding) will enhance community safety and it is legal,” he said. “Is this a movement in the right direction? That is yet to be decided on.”
The fact is, for carding as Tory defines it to end, Saunders has to want it to end, and he has to convince his officers to want it to end. And that’s a big job. As crusading journalist Desmond Cole observed at the police board meeting, the disproportionate targeting of black men speaks to a set of operational assumptions among officers that manifest in areas far beyond carding per se.
He told the stor y of a young black Etobicoke student who was on her way to McDonald’s after school with a bunch of classmates, most also black, only to have police tell them they were too numerous and order them to disperse. “This policy’s not going to do anything about that,” said Cole. Indeed, those assumptions, those manifestations, and the corrosive effect they have on individuals’ and families’ lives and the social fabric of the city wouldn’t be eliminated even if carding disappeared forever today.
In a powerful address that fittingly concluded the deputations, Knia Singh, a law student who’s launched a Charter challenge against carding, spoke of feeling “that any time you see a white car, your heart rate increases. And any time you see people who you’re supposed to go to for protection when something goes wrong, you feel like those are the people with the ultimate authority to do the most harm to you. It is not a great feeling, and it has serious repercussions.”
It’s a tragedy that such feelings exist in a city as prosperous and as safe as Toronto. The fact that carding disproportionately affects one community makes it worse; but it’s a thoroughly rotten idea altogether. Part of the deal society made in outsourcing personal protection to the police is that law-abiding people are free to tell officers to mind their business if they don’t have valid investigative reasons to insist — explicitly or implicitly — on interaction. In law, this is not the least bit controversial. Reality needs to catch up fast.
‘Any time you see a white car, your heart rate increases.’ — Law student Knia Singh