Carding policy must end ‘fishing expeditions,’ board told

Carol Andrews says she has been carded dozens of times by Hamilton police over the last six years.

Andrews, 51, is white. But she is a federal parolee — a fact she says comes up as a red flag for police when they run her licence plate, and regularly triggers them to arbitrarily pull her over.

“It’s discrimination and it’s harassment.”

Convicted of second-degree murder in St. Catharines in 1996, Andrews served 10 years in prison. She was released in 2004 and bought a home in downtown Hamilton in 2008.

She will be on full parole for the rest of her life, but she says there is no reason for police to stop her. Every time they do, Andrews says she has to contact her parole officer, to whom she otherwise only has to report four times a year.

“I did the crime, I did the time. Leave me alone. Enough,” Andrews says.

“I can’t really put it behind me and move on and better myself ... if I keep having this holding me back,” she adds. “I just want to move on with my life. I work six days a week to make ends meet. It’s hard enough to find a job with a record as it is.”

On Thursday — while Andrews was meeting with Coun. Matthew Green at City Hall to discuss her complaint — Hamilton’s police services board was in council chambers to hear deputations from the community about its draft carding policy.

In spring, the province announced stricter carding regulations for police that must be implemented by January. Under the new rules, for example, police will have to inform any citizens who voluntarily stop for them that they are not obliged to provide information.

Two members of the Community Coalition Against Racism (CCAR), Maria Antelo and Marlene DeiAmoah, shared their concerns with the current draft, and “loopholes” in the proposed policy that could continue to enable racial profiling.

Antelo hopes the new regulations will be an “improvement” over the current policy, which she says allows police to go on “fishing expeditions amongst racialized and indigenous peoples who happen to be on the street.”

But she takes issue with the fact that any information collected by police will still be stored for five years. “Currently, there exists somewhere a huge bank containing the personal information of tens of thousands of Hamiltonians who are ‘known to police’ but are otherwise fine upstanding citizens,” Antelo said. “We would like to see that information bank deleted now.”

Dei-Amoah called the policy draft a “missed opportunity” for dialogue with the city’s diverse communities, particularly given the allwhite makeup of the board.

She says there are many prominent racialized community leaders who could have been consulted “to ensure (the policy) speaks to the lived experience of carding victims.” After the delegations, board chair Lloyd Ferguson complimented the delegates’ “professional” input, but noted the new regulations are government mandated: “We’ve got to check, what do we have control over and what do we not?”

Asked about the need for community collaboration, the Ancaster councillor said that’s why the board put out the call for delegations. That only two people showed up, he said, “sends a pretty clear signal” that “maybe we have got it right.”

The police services board will finalize the policy at its December meeting after taking into consideration Thursday’s delegations.