Local officials will decide if carding lives or dies
Last week, the province unveiled new rules about police carding, the practice of stopping and documenting civilians who are not suspected of a crime. The process of developing these rules is the real story: we should never have needed a consultation about serial police violations of our legal rights through carding. Black people, who have disproportionately been targeted by our police, should never have been asked about the best way to balance our freedom with “public safety,” as if the racist police profiling of black people can ever be justified.
But residents across the province participated in public consultations on carding anyway, and told the government how to regulate carding out of existence. We asked for a rule that officers tell civilians why we are being stopped; for carbon copy receipts, like those issued for traffic violations; for the destruction of existing carding databases, as the civilian info they hold should never have been collected. The final carding regulations don’t contain any of these demands — local police service boards must include them before approving the regulation.
The new rules on carding come into effect on the first day of next year. Meanwhile, every police services board in Ontario must incorporate the regulation and train its officers accordingly. We never needed a provincial regulation on carding — local boards always had the power to stop or restrict it. The province stepped in because municipalities in general, and police boards in particular, refused to challenge their own police. But new provincial rules are a minimum standard, a guideline. Our boards must go much further.
The civilian boards charged with police oversight and accountability in Ontario’s municipalities have failed us. When the scourge of carding was exposed to these boards, they froze. Some board members, who are appointed by provincial officials or local councils, seemed more inclined to defend the police than hold them to account. When Ottawa police board chair Eli El-Chantiry learned that people of African and Asian heritage in his city were overrepresented in carding stops, he countered that “I’m a visible minority, I’ve been in Ottawa for 40 years. I was never stopped or street checked or whatever.”
Yeah, whatever. I expect police forces to use euphemisms like “street checks” and “community engagement” to mask the intimidation, coercion and humiliation that is carding. But police boards have been quick to adopt this evasive language. Toronto’s board has been working on what it called a “community contacts policy” since 2014 to address carding. Many of us have always wanted a policy on “police stops.” It’s time for civilian overseers to use plain language in describing how police treat us.
Boards will not be able to claim victory if they pass the provincial half-measures without major improvements. Hun- dreds of thousands of us who know our names are in a police database for existing in our own streets are not going to forget the stigma we carry. Specifically, black people will not forget that carding data has been used to ruin the professional hopes of people like Ayaan Farah, an airline employee who lost her security clearance and her job in part because of carding. We know how long the needless documentation can follow us, and we won’t see our hopes destroyed by reckless policing.
After he became mayor in late 2014, John Tory appointed himself to Toronto’s police services board. People were learning about carding and demanding for it to end. In April 2015, Tory reaffirmed his support for carding, voted on a policy to mostly uphold it, then tried to sell his sympathy to the shocked room of advocates and media. Tory said he believed a group of black and brown children who had told him they have regular needless and scary interactions with police. “I have no doubt as well, that my kids, if they were stopped in the street, wouldn’t be treated that way,” Tory added.
Accountability is only possible if oversight groups believe our stories of mistreatment through carding and other police activities, but that’s not good enough. We want justice, not sympathy or process. The new regulations give boards another chance to implement basic demands for police accountability. It gives Tory and his colleagues another chance to ensure that black kids in Toronto get the respect and service from police that he would expect for his own family. Carding has always been a local issue, and local police boards are to blame if it survives.