A quick fix isn’t enough

Police forces do tend to love the latest and greatest piece of equipment on offer, and strip searches are degrading and distasteful.

So it comes as no surprise whatsoever that the Toronto Police Service would like to buy a bunch of body scanners with a price tag that starts at a quarter of a million dollars apiece.

But, rather than let them race off to the shop with a multimillion-dollar cheque that will have to be covered by Toronto taxpayers, Mayor John Tory and the police board have wisely urged a closer look at the core problem:

Why do Toronto police conduct so many more strip searches than other comparable forces?

In a report this year, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) found that, between 2014 and 2016, Toronto police conducted strip searches in fully 40 per cent of arrests. By comparison, the figure in Hamilton and Ottawa was less than 1 per cent.

Every city is different, certainly, but 40 times different is a stretch too far.

No wonder Tory says he’s not interested in even talking about new equipment until he can be sure the police are actually following proper strip-search practices.

It’s been nearly 20 years since the Supreme Court of Canada declared that strip searches are “inherently humiliating and degrading” and “cannot be carried out simply as a matter of routine policy.”

But if there’s a strip search in 40 per cent of arrests in Toronto, that sounds pretty routine.

Clearly not enough has changed since that landmark court decision. Indeed, the OIPRD report itself grew out of the “unabated” number of individual strip-search complaints made to the police watchdog.

Troublingly, that report also found that Toronto police were involved in 40 of the 89 criminal court decisions since the 2001Supreme Court ruling in which a judge found a strip search violated the defendant’s charter rights. In the vast majority of those cases, the court found that police either had inadequate grounds or no grounds at all to justify a strip search.

The Supreme Court said reasonable grounds include looking for weapons or evidence related to the arrest. Yet no weapons were seized in any of those charter violation cases and 40 per cent of them related to drinking and driving charges.

That suggests too many police forces have strip-search rules that are badly outdated, the training isn’t good enough, or officers are simply ignoring the rules. None of those options is acceptable. The Toronto police force knows full well that there’s a concern here. Its report on why body scanners are such a good idea notes that the pilot project on the X-ray devices was created as a result of “a number of civil claims, external complaints, Special Investigation Unit (SIU) investigations, and Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario applications filed in relation to circumstances surrounding strip searches.”

The problem is with its suggested solution. The force wants an expensive technological quick fix when it should be looking more closely at its own policies, officer training and what’s actually happening in the field.

As far back as 1999 — even before the Supreme Court ruling — Toronto’s Police Services Board was concerned about indiscriminate use of strip searches by police.

Yet here we are, 20 years later, with another police board demanding to know why Toronto police conduct so many strip searches.

Chief Mark Saunders needs to comprehensively report back to the board on why that’s happening and what steps his force has taken to reduce those numbers before any discussion should be held about buying expensive body scanners.

Why do Toronto police conduct so many more strip searches than other comparable forces?