The chair of the Toronto Police Services board says there was a “disconnect” between the work the civilian oversight body did to address the issues surrounding carding and the way the practice was actually carried out on city streets.
Chair Alok Mukherjee made the comment to CP24 on Monday afternoon; one day after Mayor John Tory announced that he would seek the “permanent cancellation” of carding due to the growing pile of evidence suggesting that young black and brown males were being disproportionately targeted by the practice.
“In 2004 the board actually said that there will be no policing practice that has a discriminatory impact on people because of their race, ethnicity, skin colour, etcetera and Chief Blair, the board and the (Ontario)Human Rights Commission worked very hard on a comprehensive project to deal with it but there was a disconnect between that work and the practice, which the last report showed had actually doubled,” Mukherjee said. “Police have the right to talk to people but those innocent people’s information or any details about them should not go into a database. That’s where the problem has been.”
In April, the Toronto Police Service Board amended its carding policy to prohibit officers from considering “race, place of origin, age, colour, ethnic origin, gender identity or gender expression” when deciding whether to stop someone for questioning and banned any carding quotas from being put in place by management.
At the time, Tory heralded the changes as an “important landmark in advancing bias-free policing” but on Sunday he admitted that there is “no real way to fix a practice that has come to be regarded as illegitimate, disrespectful and hurtful.”
The about-face came after a number of community leaders, including former Chief Justice of Ontario Roy McMurtry, held a press conference to slam carding.as a “violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
Speaking with CP24 on Monday, Mukherjee said that the elimination of carding, which still needs to be approved by the board, would do nothing to prevent police from interacting with members of the public and may even help them build stronger ties with residents.
“We want police to be able to talk to people and we want people in the streets to interact with and engage with their police officers freely and without any fear that somehow that interaction is going to end up in a police database,” he said. “What is being asked to be ended completely is the storing of any information about innocent people who are not the subject of an investigation or suspected of being likely to be investigated.”
The practice of carding has been under a moratorium since January but had previously been expected to resume under new police chief Mark Saunders, who has called it a "valuable tool" in fighting street gangs.
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