Ontario police share data from carding with Ottawa
Anti-terrorism plan raises concerns about use of personal information taken in street checks
Ontario’s counterterrorism plan directs local and provincial police to share relevant information gleaned from street checks — or “carding” encounters — with Canada’s intelligence agency and the RCMP, according to the written plan reviewed by the Star.
Municipal police services “should ensure” that intelligence they gather “is shared regularly with key partners,” including the Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario, the Ontario Provincial Police’s anti-terrorism section, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the RCMP, according to the 2014 document — the most recent version of the plan — that was posted online by two small Ontario police services, then apparently removed.
“Front-line officers across Ontario have the unique opportunity to recognize, identify, collect and report on intelligence gathered through primary response duties, such as street checks, vehicle stops and criminal investigations,” the document states.
The 55-page Provincial CounterTerrorism Plan — along with a “high”-priority memo from the assistant deputy minister in charge of the public safety division of the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services — was sent to all Ontario police chiefs, the OPP commissioner and police services boards on Oct. 22, 2014, following the attack on Parliament Hill earlier that day.
“The police are really free to do whatever the hell they want and pass it on to whoever they want.” PAUL COPELAND MEMBER OF LAW UNION OF ONTARIO, WHICH IS CLOSELY FOLLOWING CARDING PRACTICES
The two-page memo was a reminder of the role and responsibilities of local police in responding to domestic acts of terrorism, but the plan itself sets out pre-emptive responsibilities as well, including the sharing of information.
In a post-Sept. 11 world and in the age of electronic surveillance by police and spy agencies, it should come as no shock that street-level intelligence gathered by local police is shared with higher authorities. But the explicit mention of street checks in the counterterrorism plan raises questions about the use of citizens’ personal information gathered by police in non-criminal encounters.
Although national security and civil rights experts say in some cases it’s necessary that such information be shared, they express concerns about privacy safeguards and doubts about the reliability of the information.
“I think it is appropriate that local police should be involved about terrorism, but I wonder about the quality of intelligence gathered from street checks,” said Kent Roach, a national security expert and law professor at the University of Toronto.
“This is a concern in all cases, but especially in national security because the intelligence may be less likely to be tested in court as evidence.”
The Toronto Police Service, the OPP and the RCMP confirmed to the Star that information gleaned from street checks may be shared with agencies up the chain.
In response to Star questions, the RCMP said it “does share/gather information from its law enforcement partners,” and this includes “intelligence information which is sent to our partners when there is a link to criminality or there are public safety concerns.” It’s unclear how often this happens. The RCMP said it “collects and shares information upon request by police services in accordance with the existing Canadian legal frameworks in place, including the Privacy Act.”
Andy Ellis, former assistant director of operations at CSIS, said he couldn’t discuss specific examples where street check information shared by police was of value.
But, he said, “I can say with certainty that the law enforcement-led program has provided crucial information which has advanced national security cases.”
In Toronto, information gathered through “street checks” may have been included in information passed to higher policing and intelligence agencies, “but only if it was deter- mined to be of value,” a police spokesperson, Meaghan Gray, said.
“As a member of the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team and the Provincial Anti-Terrorism Team, this sharing includes intelligence information which is sent to our partners when there is a nexus to criminality or public safety concerns,” Gray’s email reads.
“Any information that is shared is reviewed and approved by the (Toronto police) intelligence unit before being sent to another agency.”
In 2015, amid growing controversy, Toronto police suspended “carding,” or street checks — the practice of stopping, questioning and documenting people not suspected of a crime. As of this year, all Ontario police services conducting such stops must follow new provincial regulations aimed at banning arbitrary police stops.
In most policing jurisdictions, including Toronto, any officer could once access their service’s own historical carding information, but that is now restricted by the new regulations and police policies.
Toronto has now placed firm restrictions on officers accessing historic carding data, though critics have questioned whether that is enough to stop officers from accessing information that may have been improperly obtained.
An OPP spokesperson, Peter Leon, said the force has been collecting and sharing information upon request by police services “for more than 30 years, including the use of formal street checks by police.”
Asked how that happens, the OPP said that, when requested, it provides specific national security-related responses to individual queries from police services or intelligence agencies, including information gleaned from street checks.
Leon would not say how many individuals have had their details, gathered through street checks, passed on to its intelligence unit by local police services, because the answer is “operational in nature.”
“It doesn’t surprise me in the least that that’s what they’re doing,” said lawyer Paul Copeland, a member of the Law Union of Ontario who is closely following carding practices in the province.
“What surprised me a whole lot, all along the way on the carding stuff, is that they never really said what they used it for very much,” Copeland said. He said a Crown attorney once told him contact cards were used “all the time” for wiretap authorizations, “but I never saw anyone talk about that publicly.”
Street checks, Copeland added, are “really an intelligence gathering thing . . . and the whole question of how much information the government should be gathering, and what kind of oversights there are about it, seems to me to be fairly deficient as far as anybody really having any control over it.
“The police are really free to do whatever the hell they want and pass it on to whoever they want.”
Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s equality program, said the “general tenor” of the document seems to place a heavy emphasis on sharing, and “does not seem to address restrictions, limitations, caveats, (or) protections for privacy.” Mendelsohn Aviv and Brenda McPhail, the association’s privacy expert, both said information sharing between police services and agencies is important and needed to keep residents safe.
“We recognize that in the heat of the moment, in the middle of a terrorist attack, there are likely going to be exigent circumstances, emergency needs,” Mendelsohn Aviv said. “But in a plan that is put together for the purpose of doing advance thinking about what needs to be considered, there is no mention of the rights and needs of all people in this province.”
Carding data, which includes physical descriptions and personal details, can link individuals who are stopped and documented together. It also includes locations, times and reasons for the stops.
Police have defended street checks and say the databases are valuable tools that can be searched following a crime and provide connections and possible witnesses and suspects. But, when done arbitrarily, they have also caused friction and mistrust between communities and police.
Repeated Star analyses of Toronto police carding data have found that black people were more likely than white people to be stopped, questioned and documented in each of the city’s more than 70 patrol zones, and that the likelihood increased in areas that are predominantly white.
The most common reason for such documentation was “general investigation,” followed by radio calls, traffic and vehicle reasons, and loitering.
Jack Gemmell, a Toronto lawyer and a member of a working group on national security, said he is concerned about several aspects of the sharing agreement, including that it may aggravate the harm to racialized groups that have been disproportionately targeted by carding.
“By sharing this information, you are of course perpetuating the stigmatization of these people,” Gemmell said.
Overall in Toronto, between 2008 and late 2013, more than a million individuals were documented in 2.1 million carding encounters. Of those carding encounters, officers specifically noted that 14,150 involved passing on information to the service’s own intelligence unit.
When protesters descended on Toronto during the G20 summit in 2010, carding spiked by 150 per cent in the downtown patrol zones where the event was hosted. More than 500 contact cards were filled out by Toronto police officers over the summit weekend, a Star analysis found.
Of 558 contact cards filled out, 375 were for “general investigation” and 20 specifically involved passing on information to the intelligence unit. The data does not include any stops or documenting of citizens by other police involved in summit security.