Police to hand out receipts for ‘carding’
Stop-gap solution to controversial street checks will require Toronto officers to provide info forms
Toronto police will begin handing out receipts for the controversial practice of carding in July after the police services board passed several motions Thursday.
The move by the board comes a year after Known to Police — the latest series in a 10-year Star investigation into race, policing and crime — analyzed police contact card data and found that Toronto officers stop and document black and brown people at disproportionately high rates.
Some see receipts as a way to track stops and make police more accountable.
The receipt — called a Form 306 — is an interim measure while the police service and the city’s auditor general investigate carding, which many civil rights groups say violates the Charter in the first place.
The city’s solicitor has been asked to weigh in on the legality of carding, also called street checks.
“What they’re trying to do is use all these little interim measures to make the thing palatable, hoping everybody will go away and stop complaining,” said Howard Morton of the Law Union of Ontario. “But the whole thing is unlawful. The key issue is whether this is a Charter violation and a Human Rights Code violation. If it’s not, then the interim measures are great.
“If we’re right, and it is, then the interim measures don’t matter much.”
Form 306 will include the individual’s name, the name of the officer issuing the receipt, as well as the location, date, time and reason for the stop.
Police Chief Bill Blair had the forms printed up and ready to go in November after an earlier directive from the board, but the receipts were put on hold.
Some civil rights groups questioned why the abbreviated receipt doesn’t contain all the information recorded by police, who ask for other details including parents’ names and marital status.
Others were critical that it contained open-ended categories such as “general investigation” and “community engagement” as reasons for the stop.
“There is a need for transparency and accountability with respect to race-based harassment and ‘street checks,’ ” wrote Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, in a deputation to the board on Thursday. “Form 306 does not satisfy this.”
The police chief has always defended street checks as good police work in high crime areas.
After the meeting he said: “We have reason to be in neighbourhoods where there is a lot of victimization and violence, to engage with the people who are there . . . to identify those individuals who might be victimizing others. And to gather information.” It’s that “intelligence gathering” that has irked critics such as Morton, who say labelling street checks as a form of community engagement is a misnomer. The motion was one of several put forward Thursday by a board subcommittee that is pulling everything that has been at the board on carding since the series ran. The Star investigation found that while blacks make up 8.3 per cent of Toronto’s population, they accounted for 25 per cent of the cards filled out between 2008 and mid-2011. And the number of black and brown males aged 15 to 24 who had been documented since 2008 outnumbered the actual populations of young black and brown men who live in the city. Organizations such as the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, the CCLA and Black is Not a Crime have all spoken out about the issue at police board meetings. Other motions passed Thursday include asking the chief to define what types of interactions consti- tute community engagement, to post information on the Toronto police website as well as internally to explain the purpose of street checks, and to report back on the viability of providing more complete receipts.
Blair said issuing the receipts was part of a “large and complex process,” but that he could make the deadline set by the board.
“There’s an implementation process and as I indicated to the board, it involves not just the printing of the form, but we’ll have to train our officers, revise our procedures,” he said. “Public communication will have to take place as well.”