Why an end to police carding is only the beginning
I was asked, in November, to join a panel on police relations with young Torontonians. Early on in the event, police chief Bill Blair took questions from high school students. When one of them brought up the uncomfortable topic of police carding, Chief Blair said, “You have to strike a balance between community concerns and community safety.”
I knew that the balance wasn’t being struck. Later on during the event, the other panelists and I spoke with those students about their own experiences with police. I asked the students if they had themselves been carded. A couple of them raised their hands. Another panelist asked if they had been stopped by police, but not necessarily “carded.” Of the roughly twenty kids in front of us, most of them—every non-white child in that group—raised their hands.
We asked how it made them feel, and the answers were heartbreaking. Some felt “singled out,” others felt they couldn’t trust police, and still others said that, if they had a problem or felt unsafe, they would find someone other than an officer to talk to. The kids’ experience was consistent with the statistics: in neighbourhoods throughout the city, people with dark skin have been shown to be two to 10 times more likely to be carded than white people.
The difficulty with the conversation about carding is how unclear many of us are on what “carding” actually is. (For anyone still unfamiliar, it’s a police investigative technique that involves questioning people not suspected of any particular crime and logging their information in a database.) The problem became apparent a couple of weeks ago, when the media learned that Chief Blair had quietly ordered a temporary suspension of all carding activities. While it was obvious that police would no longer issue contact cards, what wasn’t clear was how police intended to address the real issue, the one that those kids had seemed to grasp so intuitively: racial profiling. If officers would no longer be carding members of the public, would they also stop targeting black Torontonians for questioning?
Our only clue came from Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack, who said the suspension “should not have an impact with the way officers interact with the public, only with how those interactions are recorded.” And, unsurprisingly, like Blair, he framed the issue as a “fragile balancing act.”
We often fall into the trap of describing community relations this way, but there is no balancing act to be found here. A Torontonian of colour who doesn’t break the law has no obligation—regardless of what we believe about crime statistics—to give up his or her rights in order to make a police officer’s job easier. To say otherwise is to say that certain Torontonians are entitled to live free of police harassment, while others, by virtue of their skin colour and the neighbourhood they happen to be in, owe an additional social tax for the benefit of “community safety”—even though there’s no proof racial profiling of any kind has helped make any community safer.
And whose safety are we talking about, exactly? If it’s that of of the residents in communities being profiled, TPS is undermining its own goals by eroding their trust. Last year, a disturbingly high percentage of survey respondents in the 31 Division catchment area reported feeling that police “abuse power” and are “not trustworthy.” One in four reported feeling unsafe when police are present. The same amount said they would be less likely to contact police if they happen to witness a crime in the future.
These are the consequences of police organizations breaching community trust. We don’t even have to look south of the border for examples. Most Torontonians don’t approve of carding. Members of the public have packed police services board meetings, unanimously demanding an end to racial profiling practices. Torontonians marched through the streets late last year, demanding police accountability. The police services board and the mayor himself have been critical of how police practices have damaged community trust. It just isn’t possible to disregard this level of public outcry with the language of “safety” anymore. And it’s not enough for TPS brass to call a temporary halt to “carding” without any concrete plan to address the underlying issue of racial discrimination that made carding such a controversial topic in the first place.
If TPS’ leadership really does believe in building safer communities, then they need to demonstrate their commitment. That can’t happen until the police finally put an end not only to carding, but to the racial profiling carding enables.
![](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://torontolife.com/city/end-police-carding-beginning/&title=Why an end to police carding is only the beginning&picture=https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20150122-policecarding.jpg&description=[caption id="attachment_305555" align="aligncenter" width="656"] (Image: Jack Landau)[/caption]
I was asked, in November, to join a panel on police relations with young Torontonians. Early on in the event, police chief Bill Blair took questions from high school students. When one of them brought up the uncomfortable topic of police carding, Chief Blair said, “You have to strike a balance between community concerns and community safety.”
I knew that the balance wasn’t being struck. Later on during the event, the other panelists and I spoke with those students about their own experiences with police. I asked the students if they had themselves been carded. A couple of them raised their hands. Another panelist asked if they had been stopped by police, but not necessarily “carded.” Of the roughly twenty kids in front of us, most of them—every non-white child in that group—raised their hands.
We asked how it made them feel, and the answers were heartbreaking. Some felt “singled out,” others felt they couldn’t trust police, and still others said that, if they had a problem or felt unsafe, they would find someone other than an officer to talk to. The kids’ experience was consistent with the statistics: in neighbourhoods throughout the city, people with dark skin have been shown to be two to 10 times more likely to be carded than white people.
The difficulty with the conversation about carding is how unclear many of us are on what "carding" actually is. (For anyone still unfamiliar, it's a police investigative technique that involves questioning people not suspected of any particular crime and logging their information in a database.) The problem became apparent a couple of weeks ago, when the media learned that Chief Blair had quietly ordered a temporary suspension of all carding activities. While it was obvious that police would no longer issue contact cards, what wasn’t clear was how police intended to address the real issue, the one that those kids had seemed to grasp so intuitively: racial profiling. If officers would no longer be carding members of the public, would they also stop targeting black Torontonians for questioning?
Our only clue came from Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack, who said the suspension “should not have an impact with the way officers interact with the public, only with how those interactions are recorded.” And, unsurprisingly, like Blair, he framed the issue as a “fragile balancing act.”
We often fall into the trap of describing community relations this way, but there is no balancing act to be found here. A Torontonian of colour who doesn’t break the law has no obligation—regardless of what we believe about crime statistics—to give up his or her rights in order to make a police officer’s job easier. To say otherwise is to say that certain Torontonians are entitled to live free of police harassment, while others, by virtue of their skin colour and the neighbourhood they happen to be in, owe an additional social tax for the benefit of “community safety”—even though there’s no proof racial profiling of any kind has helped make any community safer.
And whose safety are we talking about, exactly? If it’s that of of the residents in communities being profiled, TPS is undermining its own goals by eroding their trust. Last year, a disturbingly high percentage of survey respondents in the 31 Division catchment area reported feeling that police “abuse power” and are “not trustworthy.” One in four reported feeling unsafe when police are present. The same amount said they would be less likely to contact police if they happen to witness a crime in the future.
These are the consequences of police organizations breaching community trust. We don’t even have to look south of the border for examples. Most Torontonians don’t approve of carding. Members of the public have packed police services board meetings, unanimously demanding an end to racial profiling practices. Torontonians marched through the streets late last year, demanding police accountability. The police services board and the mayor himself have been critical of how police practices have damaged community trust. It just isn’t possible to disregard this level of public outcry with the language of “safety” anymore. And it's not enough for TPS brass to call a temporary halt to "carding" without any concrete plan to address the underlying issue of racial discrimination that made carding such a controversial topic in the first place.
If TPS’ leadership really does believe in building safer communities, then they need to demonstrate their commitment. That can’t happen until the police finally put an end not only to carding, but to the racial profiling carding enables.){kind=link}
What’s hilarious to me is that there is some criminal that carding caught and he is taking advantage of this issue by claiming that he was carded unfairly!! Notice I said that he is a criminal!! Better find a balance cause not EVERYONE is innocent and it is the Officers’ jobs to go after the bad apples. let them do their jobs!!
Anyone reading this piece should very much click that “most Torontonians don’t approve of carding” link in the second last paragraph. The numbers BARELY support this writer’s point: FORTY-TWO PER CENT of downtown Torontonians SUPPORT CARDING!!!! (Those who oppose it have a SLIGHT, barely-there majority of 55%, but in Scarborough (where crime is apparently believed to be on the rise), FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of people support carding. When these numbers are TRULY in favour of dumping the practice, let me know and maybe I’ll support it. Until then, I’m happy that then cops are investigate all manner of suspicious behaviour at all hours of the day, especially in high crime areas like Jane/Finch and pockets of Scarbox. That those areas tend to be majority black is only indicative of the problems in those communities that they just LOVE to blame on white and non-black people, or cops, rather than taking a good, long look inside to see where the rot is coming from.
Could the writer of this piece have been secretly hoping no one would actually bother to click the links? Easy assumption to make in this day and age, but some of us do take the time . . . ;-)
Apparently, one of the qualifications of being a Toronto Police Officer is being a bigot towards visible minorities. Do they go through how light-skinned you need to be not to be stopped?
Hi Rex,
I very much do hope that people click the links that I provide in my articles. I’d hate to think that anyone would accept this kind of information prima facie, and do no legwork to understand or contextualize it.
Question for you, though. Was I wrong in stating that most Torontonians don’t support carding?
Frankly, yes.
I disagree that 55% (downtown) represents “most” Torontonians, especially when the link you provide suggests that a not inconsiderable 42% (downtown) and 54% (Scarborough) apparently DO support carding, leaving a scant +/- 3% in the undecided/”don’t know” camp. While 55% against is apparently enough for some to believe the end of carding is nigh, it’s anything but the majority the left seems to want the public to believe supports the abolition (ahem) of the practice. In fairness, If EITHER side of this debate wants to truly win hearts and minds, it’s obvious they’ll have to wait until the polls (and perhaps further studies) fall much more squarely on one side or the other, rather than a borderline 50/50 poll result which can essentially be spun either way (as we’ve both done above).
By the way, good on ya for actually replying to feedback here. That’s not as common an occurrence as it should be among TL writers, in my experience.
I’m aware that a majority in Scarborough support carding, but as I mentioned, most Torontonians do not support it as a whole. Even though our perception of crime is skewed (the same Mainstreet poll showed that we believe crime is increasing when it is, in fact, decreasing), most of us with an opinion on carding don’t believe it to be an effective tool.
But regardless of what we believe, the damage of carding is clearly demonstrated in the CAPP survey that I linked. The residents of 31 division have developed a distrust for officers, and many indicated they would refuse to alert or aid police if they witnessed a crime. There’s simply no way to create safe neighbourhoods if those neighbours don’t trust the police.
All of that aside, there’s hardly even a debate to be had here, since racial profiling and arbitrary detention are Charter violations. Whether or not most Torontonians agree with carding, the conversation doesn’t hinge on whether police should racially profile, but on whether racialized groups should feel compelled to give up their Charter rights in order to create the illusion of safety. There are no hearts or minds to be won here; if police practices violate Charter rights, the protection of those rights takes priority.
There’s that “most Torontonians don’t support it” argument again when the only link you’ve provided in your article to support that statement–along with what sounds like your own perception of the level of support–proves that only SLIGHTLY MORE people in the downtown area are against carding than for it. That’s not “most”. Where’s the proof that most Torontonians support a ban on carding, or for that matter don’t support it? From the evidence so far, it’s practically a tie, and that certainly does make it worthy of continued debate (in the broadest sense; not just on a TL comments section), regardless of charter violations and so on. It happens. It’s not right, some say. But a sizable percentage of the population apparently has no issue with it, or perhaps doesn’t care about the legalities of it when it’s being implemented in areas where laws aren’t particularly abided by in the first place.
31 Division is practically an anomaly unto itself, admittedly, and I won’t deny the effect carding seems to have had on the population there in terms of trusting law enforcement, but I dont believe that stopping carding in that area (and undoubtedly others like it) will by default lead to lower rates of all the myriad social, economical, educational, interpersonal and, consequently, criminal problems that have led to it becoming prime turf for hardball police tactics in the first place. It won’t, and then those same residents will just find something else to lay at the feet of the “racist” cops (like arresting people that really deserve it) instead of taking responsibility for and working to combat the real root causes of their problems instead of just looking for scapegoats.
At the end of the day, though, I can’t help but wonder if the unquestionably substantial portion of the population that DOES support carding (based on your linked poll, and believe it or not, I’m generally NOT among them)–or at least some significant portion of it–suspects that abolishing carding and racial profiling will only allow the already higher crime rates in those areas to flourish because the cops just won’t be bothered any more.