The province’s former ombudsman says the police practice of carding is “wrong and illegal” and amounts to little more than a “form of arbitrary detention.”
In a report prepared by Andre Marin before his term expired earlier this month, the former Ontario ombudsman argues that carding is “unconstitutional” and that there is not “sufficient evidentiary support for the use of” the practice as a public safety measure.
Marin goes on to say that he views carding, wherein police stop and collect information from people who are not under arrest, as a practice similar to what some residents experienced during the G20 summit in Toronto in June 2010, something he said represented “a massive compromise of civil rights.”
“Stopping citizens without an objective and reasonable basis for believing that they may be implicated in a recent or ongoing criminal offence, or where there are reasonable and probable grounds to arrest them, is unconstitutional – it’s a form of arbitrary detention contrary to Section 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” Marin wrote in the report. “The detrimental effects of street checks on individuals and the community are simply too great to justify this practice.”
Marin’s report was only publicly released today but was submitted to the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services on Aug. 31 as part of the government’s public consultations on the creation of new province-wide regulations on carding.
In his report, Marin says that carding is “more than a minor inconvenience” and in fact has “real and lasting negative impacts” on the lives of those who are stopped.
Marin also objects to the government’s intention to create regulations on carding in the absence of any evidence supporting its value to police.
“I believe that this starting point is flawed. Prior to putting pen to paper in drafting a regulation, the Ministry should first satisfy itself that there is independent, objective, evidence-based data to support that street checks do achieve concrete and significant results in solving and preventing crimes,” he said. “It should not simply accept the subjective and anecdotal protestations of its policing partners.”
25 recommendations
In June Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services Yasir Naqvi announced that the government would step in and form a working group to help formulate new rules on carding with the hope of having them in place sometime this fall.
The announcement came amid increasing calls from community activists to scrap the practice altogether due to the belief that it disproportionately targets young black and brown men.
In Toronto, the public opposition was so strong that Mayor John Tory initially promised to seek the abolition of the practice altogether, noting that it had “come to be regarded as illegitimate, disrespectful and hurtful.”
The Toronto Police Services Board, however, later voted to continue allowing the practice but under stricter conditions.
In his report, Marin makes a total of 25 recommendations on how the province could reform carding.
Some of the recommendations include telling everyone who is stopped that they have the right to walk away, banning the carding of anyone under the age of 18, and restricting the use of carding to situations where the information is collected for an “identifiable and specific investigative purpose.”
Marin also recommends a regulation that would require police officers to “document the reason for collecting the information” from subjects they card.
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