Carding-like street check occurs in Peel, police say

Chief confirms questionable tactic after Mississauga and Brampton mayors order police review of practices in their cities

Hours after the mayors of Brampton and Mississauga ordered Peel police to answer questions about carding practices in the region, the police chief confirmed to the Star her officers do stop individuals, ask for personal information and enter it into a database, sometimes stopping people at random even if the police are not conducting a criminal investigation.

Peel police Chief Jennifer Evans said it’s possible officers would stop someone in a high-crime area and ask questions. The Peel force refers to it as a “street check.”

“That’s what I want my officers to do. I want my officers to be talking to people on the street engaging them, finding out what’s going on . . . yes, if the officer feels that there’s something that they think, ‘OK, that warrants it to be documented,’ then they would do it.”

The chief said she did not immediately know how many street checks the force does annually but would provide that information later.

Her responses Friday, right after the Peel Police Services Board ordered a review of the practice, differ from statements released by Peel police recently, in the wake of the Toronto police carding controversy. Peel police stated earlier this week that officers only gather identifying information from individuals in a “Street Check Form . . . submitted by officers to report suspicious activity that, when combined with other evidence, may assist investigators in solving crime.”

Evans said Friday that the identifying information gathered by Peel police officers is entered directly into an electronic database from their police cars, a process Toronto police use sometimes.

Her comments on Peel police practices came shortly after Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie and Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey, both of whom sit on the Peel Police Services Board, successfully brought forward a motion at Friday’s board meeting calling for a review of the practice. The motion refers to the controversy around these checks unfairly targeting ethnic minority communities and states information generated from the stops is "widely considered unreliable."

The force polices Brampton and Mississauga, two of the most diverse cities in Canada, where visible minorities made up 60 per cent of the population in 2011, compared to 49 per cent in Toronto.

Jeffrey told the Star she first learned of the “street check” practice in Peel when she was canvassing door-to-door during last year’s municipal election.

“I heard it many times when I was campaigning. I met with a group of lawyers during the course of the campaign, and I was horrified by the number of people around the table of 20 or 30 people who had been stopped. There was no criminal activity going on. They were just driving down the street, and they were stopped.”

Jeffrey described a recent meeting with South Asian lawyers and business people in Brampton to talk about business opportunities and the conversation veered onto the street checks.

“They felt they were being targeted because they happened to be in a nice car,” Jeffrey said. “There didn’t appear to be any criminal activity going on, or the likelihood of criminal activity. “What they told me was troubling.” Sophia Brown Ramsay is the program manager for the Black Com- munity Action Network of Peel. She says carding has been going on in Peel for at least a decade, but she credits Chief Evans, whom she met with this week, for finally putting the issue at the top of her priority list: “We met with the chief and her leadership Wednesday. We wanted to mend some fences.”

Ramsay said she has routinely heard about black and brown residents being carded. “Yes, you can get stopped and asked questions and your name gets entered into a database. The chief said this tool has helped catch a perpetrator in a particular crime. But so many people of colour have complained to us that they have been stopped simply for being black or brown, exactly what’s happened in Toronto.”

Jeffrey and Crombie called for the review, but stopped short of saying they will call for an absolute end to carding in Peel, as Mayor John Tory has done in a sudden change of heart. Both said Chief Evans has explained to them that the high-profile 2003 murder of 9-year-old Scarborough resident Cecilia Zhang, whose body was found in Mississauga, was solved with the help of information from a street check.

“I believe that we need to do intelligent policing,” Jeffrey said. “I don’t want my residents to be stopped for the random practice of information gathering, and it appears to me that it is random right now.”

Crombie said, “Linda (Jeffrey) and I decided that we would do this, that we would get ahead of this issue and lead on it so that if there were problems, they could be fixed . . . we have to ensure that people’s rights and freedoms are protected. This is the right way to go, to have a full public review of our policy.”

Evans pointed out Peel police were already ahead of the issue by working with the Ontario Human Rights Commission as well as the Crown Attorney’s office for the last several months.

"We’re creating training on this exact issue, on ’why did I stop you’. . . so that it’s fair and impartial policing.

"But what is not being told is the success stories, is the crimes that are being solved by the investigative tool that this provides.”

“They felt they were being targeted because they happened to be in a nice car. There didn’t appear to be any criminal activity going on.” BRAMPTON MAYOR LINDA JEFFREY ON STREET CHECKS