Premier Wynne, give us the data on police carding | Desmond Cole

Agree. The data should and needs to be shared:

Last week, the province launched a public consultation on police carding, the controversial practice of stopping and documenting civilians who are not suspected of any crime (some police forces use the terms “street checks” or “proactive policing” to describe the practice). The news is welcome and overdue — for years, police forces across Ontario have been disproportionately carding people with dark skin in the name of public safety.

The consultation includes an online survey, whose opening paragraph claims that “information collected during street checks may help solve and prevent crime.” Our police have never produced any data to back up this critical argument, and the province fails to do so in its consultation. If Queen’s Park wants meaningful public input on carding, it must publish independent, province-wide data showing how often carding happens, whom it tends to affect, and how much relevant information, if any, it produces.

Carding remains controversial in part because police tend to suppress data about it. The few existing stats tell us nothing about the relationship between carding and public safety. But data from police in Ottawa, Hamilton and Toronto is clear about carding’s racial bias; in each of these cities, black residents are overwhelmingly the most likely people to be carded.

Only 5 per cent of Ottawa residents are black, but 20 per cent of people carded in the nation’s capital in recent years have been black. Since 2010, Hamilton police have carded blacks at a rate of three to four times their share of the local population. The total number of people carded in Toronto dropped sharply in 2013, but during the same period the share of blacks being carded actually went up. This is the reality in three of Ontario’s five most populated cities.

The police forces responsible for this skewed policing deny there is any problem, and simultaneously hide relevant info on their activities. In June, Ottawa police chief Charles Bordeleau claimed his force did not collect information on the racial breakdown of carding incidents. A month later under growing public scrutiny, Ottawa police produced the race-based data the chief claimed they didn’t have.

…Officers with the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) have done the majority of Toronto police’s carding in recent years. TAVIS has refused the Star’s requests for data on the number of its contacts that result in arrests or the recovery of guns. However TAVIS data from 2008, the most recent year available, shows that officers failed to lay charges during 98 per cent of carding interactions; that same year, TAVIS officers recovered a firearm once in every 650 times they carded a resident.

Premier Wynne, give us the data on police carding | Toronto Star.