I’ve been trying to understand the challenges facing young men in Toronto, particularly young black men and others of colour being stopped by Toronto police in “carding” incidents or street checks. More than 350,000 of these incidents occur over a year, or almost 1,000 times a day.
The Toronto Star has published a number of analytical features on this police practise, and the Toronto Police Services Board is concerned enough to schedule a public meeting on the matter this month.
Here’s an analogy I’ve found helpful. The police decide that white-collar crime is a problem in the city. They’ll need to create a database of all those who might be involved so that when an incident occurs they can immediately question the most likely suspects.
To get the information for the database, officers flood into the Financial District to stop and question the most likely suspects, namely well-dressed white men between the ages of 40 and 60 years. Women are less likely to hold senior positions in financial companies, so they need not be stopped, nor men of colour for the same reason.
Officers are told to stop members of the target group and ask them a series of questions: name, home address, date of birth, workplace and position in the company, marital status. They are also required to note facial hair, hair style, any tattoos or other skin markings and clothing.
Those stopped will be required to allow police to look into briefcases, and often they will be frisked. Police put pressure on those stopped to gain consent for these intrusions. If that doesn’t work, they often find a way to charge those who don’t co-operate, calling it obstructing police.
An important task is to identify associates of those stopped. So, officers learn who knows who: networks are very helpful in sorting out who might be involved in a crime. This information is entered into a database so any officers can access it at any time. Those stopped have no access to this data and have no idea whether the information police have gathered about them is incriminating or accurate. Data is kept for seven or more years.
Police brush aside complaints about carding. They say it makes the city safer. They say it’s not racial profiling. They say it’s entirely legal for police to ask anyone questions, and those with nothing to fear will have no trouble co-operating.
One can easily imagine that few businessmen would permit police to intrude in this manner.
The difference between white businessmen resisting and young black men resisting is one of power: the former have the resources to threaten legal action, and the latter don’t, and some have been beaten up and arrested for refusing to answer.
The similar practise in New York City, called “stop and frisk,” has just been declared unconstitutional by the courts, and Bill de Blasio, the leading candidate to be elected mayor on Nov. 5, has said he will stop the practise. Here, no elected person will speak up on the practise for fear of being attacked by the police association and officers, something that has occurred to those who have spoken up in the past.
Toronto police are so confident they are doing the right thing that they are modifying the practise to call it “community engagement,” and the data collected will be called “community safety notes.”
One knows that government is going down the wrong track when it engages in such Orwellian euphemisms.
Post City Magazines’ columnist John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto and the author of a number of urban planning books.