Carding can’t help police catch a murderer
The man who walked into a Vaughan café two weeks ago and shot four people, killing two of them, is still at large and remains unidentified by York Regional Police. Since the shooting, police have released images and video footage of the suspected shooter, and have recovered a stolen vehicle he used to flee the scene. This information, in combination with tips from the public, may help police apprehend their suspect.
The search for criminal suspects is undoubtedly one of the most important and fraught police responsibilities. The moka café investigation features several examples of useful police intelligence: specific descriptions of the suspect and the car he drove after allegedly committing the offence, assertions by police that the shooting was premeditated, witnesses, dates, times, photos, video.
Imagine that York Regional Police, armed with all this information, instructed its officers to arbitrarily stop, question and document men walking in the streets in an attempt to catch the suspect. That practice, now known as police carding, might make police very visible and seemingly active in public view, but it would be an illegal, wasteful, and foolish use of police resources. How shameful that Toronto’s police use similar high-profile shootings and gang activity to justify carding and the racist profiling of black residents.
Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders has used two well-known shootings — the Boxing Day 2005 killing of Jane Creba, and the 2012 mass shootings on Danzig St. — to justify the use of carding. “You get at gangs by finding out who the members of the gangs are,” Saunders said in May. The chief added that in police confrontations with suspected gang members, “you and I are going to have a conversation and I’m going to record the conversation whether you like it or not.”
The general public sympathizes with this kind of police bravado, especially because it promises to threaten only a tiny group of young black men involved in street gang activity in poor and racialized neighbourhoods. But arbitrary stops as conducted by Toronto police — a staggering 1.8 million stops of over a million individuals between 2008 and 2012 alone — are an unlawful and fruitless distraction from evidence-based approaches that can actually solve crimes.
The moka café suspect is a young black man, approximately six feet tall and muscular. If he had committed his crime in a low-income Toronto neighbourhood, rather than an espresso bar in affluent Vaughan, every black man in the area would rightfully fear he might become the subject of undue police scrutiny.
In truth, Toronto police routinely stop black people without reference to any specific criminal event. In 2013, a black person was the most likely target of carding in every neighbourbourhood in Toronto. Police hold black civilians in a permanent state of suspicion and surveillance.
We are often told we “fit the description” of a criminal suspect like the café shooter, although police routinely refuse to provide such descriptions when asked. We are asked to surrender our identification, even though police won’t give us the name of the person or people they seek. In many cases, like the café killing, the name of the suspect is not known. We are asked for ID anyway, and catalogued like cattle.
To justify arbitrary stops, police treat black Torontonians as potential gang members on our own streets. The café suspect may himself have ties to organized criminals. There have been a series of targeted shooting in Vaughan in the last year, many of which are allegedly related to members of an Italian mafia. And we now know that an illegal gaming operation was being run in the café where the shooting occurred. I doubt York police, in an attempt to identify potential mafia members, have been stopping residents of Italian descent and demanding identification. Residents wouldn’t tolerate such hateful stereotyping, and neither would the media or public.
The fact that the Vaughan suspect is black and six feet tall does not give police permission to stop and question any of the thousands of six-foot-tall black men in the GTA. They have pictures of the suspect’s face, information about a vehicle he drove, eyewitnesses to the shooting, evidence from the crime scene, and tips from the general public. Legitimate police investigations exploit such information; carding and racial profiling target all black people, not to solve crime but to solidify the racist idea that public safety means control of black people’s movements.
It is common, when reading news stories about black suspects in our city and region, to also read accompanying reader comments full of anti-black prejudice, racist outrage, and calls for black people to take responsibility for an alleged criminal’s actions. Our police use this racist fear of blackness to profile and scapegoat dark-skinned people, instead of relying on the intelligence-led methods that should always guide a criminal investigation.
I doubt York police, in an attempt to identify potential mafia members, have been stopping residents of Italian descent