National Post Editorial: Good Riddance to Carding

From the National Post Editorial Board:

Police have long defended carding as a vital law enforcement tool, and claim it has led to breakthroughs in major cases. But critics have long claimed  the process was inherently discriminatory, as young, black, male Torontonians were far more likely to be carded than others.

The critics were right. Data compiled by the Toronto Star revealed that young black men were being carded far more often than other citizens. Blacks, who are less than 10% of Toronto’s population, made up roughly a quarter of those being carded.

This is not to suggest that the police were simply bigoted. It is a sad truth that young black men in Toronto kill and are killed at a number that is wildly disproportionate to their share of the population. Young black men are charged with violent crimes more often than their numbers alone would warrant. Carding was the police response to the genuine issue of alarmingly high rates of violent crime among Toronto’s black youth.

But it was still the wrong response. Since 2008, more than a million people have been carded in a city that only sees somewhere in the region of 50 homicides a year. Not only was this an unwarranted police intrusion into the lives of citizens, but it needlessly stigmatized members of a racial minority, casting individuals under suspicion — or certainly making them feel under suspicion — solely on the basis of their race.

My only comment, as earlier posts this week have illustrated (A MacArthur Grant Winner Tries to Unearth Biases to Aid Criminal Justice – NYTimes.com, The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men), is not that the police are “simply bigoted” but they, like all of us, have subconscious biases and prejudices that play a role here.

National Post editorial board: Good riddance to carding