Toronto Mayor John Tory calls for end to carding – Toronto – CBC News

2015/06/09 Leave a comment

Quite a change from his earlier position (not a bad thing in itself to be flexible and respond to public pressure):

Tory said the issue has been among “the most personally agonizing” since he became mayor.

“After great personal reflection and many discussions … I concluded it was time to say, enough. It was time to acknowledge there is no real way to fix a practice which has come to be regarded as illegitimate, disrespectful and hurtful.

“It was better to start over.”

Tory said his discussions included a talk with journalist Desmond Cole, who recently wrote about his experiences with carding for Toronto Life.

Cole said he was “overjoyed” with the mayor’s move, but cautioned that more action is needed.

“This has been a long time coming,” Cole told reporters. “Now we have to make sure [Tory] and the police services board and Chief Mark Saunders follow-up on this announcement … so carding is actually ended. So we’ll wait and see.”

Toronto Mayor John Tory calls for end to carding – Toronto – CBC News.

Christie Blatchford’s take:

Carding aside, what’s interesting here is that as of last week, presumably shortly before he hopped that plane to Edmonton, Tory was proudly standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Toronto’s new police chief, Mark Saunders, in defending the practice — always with a view to reforming it and improving it, he said (as indeed does the chief) but defending it nonetheless, and seemingly with sincerity.

It was a brave, if politically dangerous, position to take, I thought, and reinforced the romantic notion I think I had of the new mayor. (Before running for mayor, he was the host of a radio show on Newstalk 1010, where I was a regular guest, and I came to like him very much, and still do.)

But he is a politician, after all, and one who after several unsuccessful forays in politics has landed in a job he absolutely loves and for which he seems tailor-made: He works like a dog, is out and about every weekend at this festival or that, and has been by most measures a pretty good mayor.

And politicians, perhaps particularly those who enjoy the work and relentless social contact it entails, don’t like being unloved.

The voices against carding were rising; nothing said that better than a press conference last week featuring all manner of former civic leaders (why, they ran the gamut from A to B, from Gordon Cressy to David Crombie) denouncing the practice. And the voices against it were also louder (the Star has made it a veritable campaign, with at least one of its columnists suggesting pretty directly that Tory was a racist for supporting carding) than any on the other side.

I suspect internal polling numbers told Tory this was not a fight he would win, and that his support, even for a reformed version of carding, might define his mayoralty. And it’s a more believable explanation than the revelation-in-a-taxi or the epiphany-on-the-streetcar.

Christie Blatchford: Epiphanies on playing the cards right

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Mark Saunders working to overcome ‘carding’ criticism

2015/05/29 Leave a comment

Saunders really is an impressive communicator, both in terms of the substance of what he says as well as the way he says it:

Chief Saunders also said that while he is committed to halting random police checks of citizens just going about their business, carding suspected gang members is vital to keeping the city safe. “If it’s done right, it protects people.”

To those who say that carding amounts to a form of racial profiling, targeting a disproportionate number of racial-minority residents, Toronto’s first black police chief said: “We’re not sending officers into areas because people are brown or black. We’re looking at the charts. We’re looking at where the violence is occurring and it’s about six per cent of the geographics of the city. And so we’re putting officers in there because that’s where the violent crimes are occurring.”

When critics respond that that amounts to racial profiling by demographics, “Well, I’m, like, going, ‘Can someone help me out here? Like, we’re getting all the problems but can someone give me a solution?’”

Still does not completely explain the weakness of the earlier report he was responsible for (Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders’s secret carding report) but situates carding within an evidence-based approach targeting areas with higher crime rates.

Mark Saunders working to overcome ‘carding’ criticism – The Globe and Mail.

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How we can all stand up against carding | Desmond Cole

2015/05/28 Leave a comment

Desmond Cole, the author of the Toronto Life article on his experiences with discrimination, on the role that all of us can play:

As the realities of police carding become more known in Toronto, the public is increasingly rejecting the practice. Sixty per cent of respondents to a recent Forum poll disapprove of carding, the Toronto police practice of stopping civilians who are not suspected of any crime, and documenting their personal identification. Black voters, who admittedly made up a small sample size in the survey, rejected carding to the tune of 81 per cent. Given that innocent black people are disproportionately the targets of carding, this is no surprise.

Since I wrote a Toronto Life feature on discrimination, in which I documented the many times I have been needlessly stopped or carded by Toronto police, I’ve received hundreds of messages from people asking what they can do to counter this shady practice. I propose a simple but revolutionary intervention that nearly anyone can take up: if you see a black person being stopped in public by Toronto police, simply approach that person and ask, “Are you OK?”

In my experience, this suggestion evokes a curious amount of anxiety in people, particularly white people, the vast majority of whom are never arbitrarily stopped by police. They wonder if they might be putting themselves in danger by intervening in a police interaction.

To this I can only reply that in 2013, black Torontonians were up to 17 times more likely than white residents to be carded by police in certain neighbourhoods, particularly those with a majority of white residents. Those who are not targeted in this way might consider how scary it is for those who live it every day.

How we can all stand up against carding | Toronto Star.

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Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders’s secret carding report

2015/05/27 1 Comment

Unfortunately, The Star’s analysis appears more methodically sound than the internal police report:

The police analysis did not — as the Star has done in four analyses since 2010 — single out people with black and brown skin who had been carded, and compare those figures to the baseline populations for those groups in Toronto.

The police carding database divides people into four skin colours: white, black, brown and “other.” The police lumped all non-white groups together in determining there was no bias. The Star has used neighbourhood-level census data and police carding data to show that blacks in Toronto are more likely than whites to be carded in each of the city’s 70-plus patrol zones. To a lesser extent, the same was true for people with “brown” skin.

The Saunders report included a recommendation that the service react to “deliberate misinterpretation” of carding data by the Star and “misleading, inflammatory” stories. That did not happen.

Saunders, in his first press conference as chief-designate, referred to innocent people who get carded as “collateral damage.” He later admitted it was a poor choice of words, saying the “proper term should be the ‘social cost’ … in which members of the community do not feel that they are being treated with dignity and respect.”

Saunders has said he is open to making sure officers are not conducting “random” stops.

The Star sought comment from both Saunders and Sloly on the early “community engagement” report and on the context of the internal correspondence.

Instead, the service issued a two-page response crafted by the “PACER Team,” on behalf of Saunders. In it, the police say “we have adamantly opposed the (Star’s) analysis” and methodology since 2002 and “stand by” the criticisms of the Star made in Saunders’s secret 2012 report.

Police again criticized the Star’s use of census data, and again said contacts with the public “will never be in proportion to census figures.” The response reiterates a longstanding police statement that officers police where violent crime goes on.

Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders’s secret carding report | Toronto Star.

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Advising resistance to police’s carding efforts grows more tempting: James

2015/05/15 Leave a comment

Royson James on Toronto police carding and the recent court decision:

In awarding damages to a man stopped in Moss Park and beaten up by police after he refused to engage the officer, citing his right to walk about the street without police harassment, Superior Court Justice Frederick Myers wrote:

“One who is not being investigated for criminality is allowed to walk down the street on a cold night with his or her hands in the pockets and to tell the inquisitive police officers to get lost without being detained, searched, exposed to sub-zero temperatures, or assaulted.”

You think?

Judge Myers awarded the victim, Mutaz Elmardy, $27,000 in damages in the 2011 incident.

“That police officers shattered Mr. Elmardy’s feeling of the law strikes at the rule of law itself and requires condemnation by the court,” the judge wrote.

You, sir, are a credit to your profession.

The same cannot be said of our Mayor John Tory (open John Tory’s policard). Since his election, it seems like he has done everything to perpetuate this odious police practice — from manipulating the membership of the police board, to hiring a chief committed to carry on the controversial exercise.

Tory calls carding corrosive. He says the police board is reviewing it. Yet he wouldn’t demand basic police accountability: provide those carded with a receipt of the encounter and respectfully inform them of their right not to engage.

http://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2015/05/13/advising-resistance-to-polices-carding-efforts-grows-more-tempting-james.html

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Toronto police chief won’t abolish controversial practice of carding: ‘There will be an increase in crime’

2015/05/01 Leave a comment

Dose of reality on levels of change to be expected given police will always want more information and data (earlier post on new policy Toronto Police’s carding reform is built on a good foundation):

Asked specifically what would happen if carding was banned, Saunders replied: “If we removed the ability of our officers to engage with the community, all I can tell you is it will put us in a situation where there will be an increase in crime.”

A new city policy on carding, adopted by the police services board in April, is subject to mandatory review after six months. The policy, which stripped away safeguards and restrictions proposed in an earlier draft, allows police to stop citizens without telling them they’re free to go unless they specifically ask. It also removes an earlier requirement for police to hand out receipts to anyone they card.

At the summit Wednesday, Mayor John Tory, who sits on the police services board, defended the process that led to the new policy.

“I completely accept the fact that the system as has been, the system which was in place, combined with inadequate framing, which I think is a major shortcoming we’ve had in the system, frequently produced unjust, discriminatory consequences for black young people in particular,” he said. But when he came into office five months ago, he added, there was effectively no carding policy at all.

“The policy we recently approved was not only the best we could do at that time, but it was better than no oversight, no policy and procedure,” he said.

As for what will happen after the six-month review, Saunders appeared to rule out at least one potential option.

“Abolishing it,” he said, ” is not the way in which we’re going to say ‘everything is going to be better.’”

Toronto police chief won’t abolish controversial practice of carding: ‘There will be an increase in crime’

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Why Toronto’s police board caved on carding — and why the battle isn’t over: James | Toronto Star

2015/04/15 Leave a comment

More on the Toronto Police carding compromise and the ongoing debate (see earlier Toronto Police’s carding reform is built on a good foundation):

But the compromise, brokered by a retired judge, leaves them untouched, prompting critics to charge that Mukherjee has sold out.

After a year of back-and-forth, Blair’s position has not moved, Mukherjee said. Blair feels that to define what is a “public safety reason” for carding is to limit the police. The board’s vote has no effect if the chief does not interpret the vote by writing operational commands that the rank and file must follow.

Meanwhile, community pressure has mounted as complaints pointed to statistics that showed black and brown citizens were four times more likely to be carded than whites.

“We were getting nowhere,” said Mukherjee. “There was a standoff. We were at an impasse.”

Mukherjee said the board, the civilian authority over the force, had only one option, other than compromise: charge the chief with insubordination.

When the board failed to do that last September, the moment passed. To try that in January, a few months before Blair was set to retire, would have been suicidal.

“If the board declared the chief insubordinate, then the matter would go to a tribunal and it would be stuck there for several years, with the carding matter remaining unresolved.

“I’m a practical man. Nobody wants to go to war with the chief.”

So, Mukherjee concluded he would accept an approach that, he says, achieves 90 per cent of the goal — and pursue the rest under a new chief that could be announced as early as Friday. Blair retires at the end of the month.

Mukherjee says he understands the disappointment and the criticism of citizens who’ve clamored for reforms and were on the verge of receiving them when the police board approved the new carding procedures last year.

He admits the board understands that the proposal mediated by retired judge Warren Winkler is “very different from the 2014 proposal.”

But full reforms were not going to happen under Blair, who was prepared to go only so far.

On Thursday, the board could make a few tweaks on three items, to signal it is listening to concerns.

New rules might say police “shall” (not, may) give citizens a business card following carding interactions. Secondly, if a citizen asks the police for clarity on whether they are being detained or are free to leave and not answer questions, the police must provide that information. And the chief is to provide clear criteria for eliminating historical data in police files.

Still, “the ground has shifted. The board and the new chief will take us to the next level,” he says.

Mukherjee, 69, has been on the board for 10 years. His term ends a year from now, and he won’t seek reappointment. This is his last year as chair, ending in December. His successor is expected to come from a city of Toronto appointee, to be named in the coming months, who replaces Andy Pringle, a board member whose term ended last November.

Distrust started building among police watchers following a flurry of changes on a board that had finally developed solidarity around policing reforms.

In quick succession, John Tory was elected mayor and took a seat on the board. Tory replaced Councillors Michael Thompson and Frances Nunziata with Shelley Carroll  and Chin Lee. Former councillor Mike Del Grande left city hall for the school board. The entire board dynamic changed. And, before long, carding reforms developed over two years were set aside with a compromise that critics say gutted the proposal.

At the last police board meeting April 2, where the compromise position was panned by every citizen and group appearing before the board, one speaker wondered if Mukherjee had been kidnapped, zapped, and had a brain transplant.

“I haven’t been zapped, no.”

“The new chief needs some breathing room. To drop the carding bombshell at his door, essentially untouched and without any progress, would be crippling, he said.

Mukherjee said he and the board faced a “practical dilemma.” In trying to accomplish “one of the most significant things the Toronto Police Services Board will do,” the board ran into a brick wall, with no palatable options.

Why Toronto’s police board caved on carding — and why the battle isn’t over: James | Toronto Star.

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Toronto Police’s carding reform is built on a good foundation

2015/04/10 2 Comments

Marcus Gee’s take on the reforms to carding practices:

Chief Blair said on Friday that he doesn’t want his officers just hanging around the station “waiting for a radio call to say some catastrophe’s happened” then going out to put yellow tape around the scene. Instead, he wants his officers to hit the streets to make contact with the public, build trust with the community and gather information that might help solve or prevent crimes. That is the essence of community policing, now in use by many police forces around the world.

The compromise struck by the board and the chief is an attempt to come up with a policy that would let police continue to have their interactions with the public but at the same time ensure that people they encounter don’t feel harassed or singled out because of their race.

To that end, police officers are to be explicitly prohibited from using “race, place of origin, age, colour, ethnic origin, gender identity or gender expression in deciding whether to initiate a community engagement” (unless such factors form part of “a specific suspect, victim or witness description.”) On top of that, they will be told to weigh the value of any engagement against an “individual’s right to be left alone” and to consider the issue of “psychological detention” – a person’s perception that he or she has no choice but to comply with police.

Chief Blair promises that the force will train officers in how to conduct engagements with the public respectfully and within the law; that it will report to the board regularly on the engagement policy; that it will refrain from imposing carding quotas on officers; and that it will take care not to gather or keep masses of irrelevant data.

None of this will be enough for many of the activists, human-rights organizations and community groups that have besieged the board over the carding issue. They don’t like the fact that officers will be able to initiate contact and gather information as long as there is a “valid public safety purpose,” a pretty broad authorization. They don’t like the fact that police will not be required to issue a receipt to those it contacts (instead, officers will have business cards they can hand out) or inform people whom they stop that they have the right to walk away. But the settlement announced on Friday is not a final policy, and its principles form a good foundation.

Toronto Police’s carding reform is built on a good foundation – The Globe and Mail.

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National Post Editorial: Good Riddance to Carding

2015/01/09 Leave a comment

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 

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Carding drops but proportion of blacks stopped by Toronto police rises

2014/07/28 3 Comments

Likelihood_of_being_stopped_if_you_re_black_increases_halfway_through_2013___Toronto_StarToronto stats on carding (declining) and people stopped (increasing), and the police response. Having the data allows us to ask the appropriate questions; not having data reduced the potential for informed discussion on issues related to socioeconomic factors or biases:

It’s a pattern some police watchers describe as “disturbing” and a sign of “systemic discrimination.”

Toronto police, however, say they are working hard to eliminate prejudice in the force, but that the race of those carded will always be disproportionate because of factors such as socioeconomic disparity.

“This isn’t an exercise in social engineering,” Deputy Chief Peter Sloly said last week when asked why the proportion of black people being carded rose even as carding overall plummeted.

“We go where crime occurs. We go where the community calls us to go. And we go where our own sources of information tell us that crime or other safety issues are occurring.

”While acknowledging there is some element of racial bias in policing, Sloly said “we’re not going to take ownership of all of the social ills that befall us as a 24/7 service provider.”

Carding drops but proportion of blacks stopped by Toronto police rises | Toronto Star.

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