Let’s be clear on ‘carding’
It’s not clear whether Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders is deliberately obfuscating or simply lacks communication skills.
He just can’t bring himself to say he’ll drop the controversial practice of “carding.” Saunders missed another opportunity on Thursday when he refused to abandon this approach in a lengthy interview on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning.
“When we do it right, it’s lawful,” Saunders said. “When we do it right, it enhances public safety.”
This comes just days after Mayor John Tory publicly called for a permanent end to carding on the grounds that it has grievously undermined public trust. Furthermore, the Ontario Human Rights Commission issued a report on Thursday also calling on police to quit this practice. And a black law student, Knia Singh, has filed a lawsuit arguing that carding is a breach of charter rights.
Instead of issuing a clear and definitive statement on this crucial issue, Saunders took refuge in various definitions of carding (he outlined three) and insisted: “You need to pick a definition for me to work with.” With all due respect, that’s not leadership. To be fair, Saunders did list some key changes he’d make to carding, as it was formerly done. Ironically, although he refused to say he would end it, Saunders described a dramatic turn away from the past — a shift so pronounced that what police do might not be considered “carding” at all.
The practice has been suspended, pending reform. But it involved having officers stop people, more or less at random, in order to ask a series of intrusive questions. These were individuals who had committed no apparent crime. Their responses were detailed on official “contact cards” and entered into a massive database.
The system was meant to help officers better understand the neighbourhood they were patrolling by making them familiar with people in the area. But a series of Star investigations convincingly showed that people with black or brown skin were being carded at disproportionally high rates in a pattern consistent with racial profiling.
Saunders expressed his determination to end the random aspect of these stops, focusing police attention instead on the criminal element in communities. “I do not want the random stopping of people,” he said. “I will not support the random stopping of anybody. I do not tolerate that.”
Such stops were the essence of carding. Saunders would replace that unwholesome approach with what he calls a “surgical” and “intelligence-led” system focused on scrutinizing actual law breakers. More detail is needed on how this would work, but it’s hard to argue against investigating criminals. Police questioning is warranted — indeed necessary — under such circumstances.
Saunders also pointed out that a quota system, rating officers on how many people they carded, has been eliminated. He expressed openness to having police issue a receipt to those they question, which was a key reform sought last year. And Saunders said he had taken a massive police database, complied through years of carding, offline. “We’ve taken it off the grid.” (He said it’s in storage, rather than erased, for legal reasons in case need for this information arises in court.)
Taken together all these changes might well be described as spelling the end of carding, as it’s been understood, in Toronto. But Saunders won’t say so. Perhaps he’s bad at explaining his case. Or he’s intentionally shying away from so explicit a statement, fearing it would alienate rank-and-file cops reluctant to embrace change.
Either way, it’s not serving the public particularly well. Clarity is required. Tory intends to move a motion banning carding at the police board’s June 18 meeting and it deserves support. But the panel has to go a step further and explain — better than Saunders has done — precisely what this means and what new policies it will entail.
Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders needs to do a better job of explaining his position on carding