TORONTO

This entire subject of carding has me feeling as if I was back in the 1960s fighting for my civil rights.

I thought Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and other brave men and women already fought this fight to prevent differential treatment based on race. I thought Toronto and Canada were champions of multiculturalism and equality regardless of race or religion.

What I have found over the past two years is that the educated citizens of Toronto are not as fair and open minded as I thought, and the justice system is not blind, as it sees colour very clearly. I always envisioned myself helping humanity on a broad scale to fight homelessness, poverty, and corruption, yet here I am fighting to be free from arbitrary detention and systemic racism 50 years after that fight was supposedly won.

The people of the GTA must take a step back and listen to the countless stories of the persecuted that have not been told. There is a history of police culture throughout North America that sanctions racial violence, and that covers it up to seem as if it is deserved, expected, and the natural way of doing things. The reality is African-Canadians are the lowest hanging fruit for the system to pick in order for it to feed itself without regard to whether justice is being served or not. Police culture has allowed officers to take liberties on people of colour because there is very little chance of a challenge to their authority, there is less of a chance that a high powered lawyer will come to the defence of anyone done wrong by police practice, and therefore the ugly reality of those who choose to abuse their power continues without ever being addressed.

Join Knia Singh for a live chat on police carding Friday at 1 p.m. here at torontosun.com

What must be made clear is that carding by definition is the collection of information on people that are not suspected of any crime. On the ground, carding is arbitrary detention by a person in authority without probable cause in order to illicit information that may lead to suspicion that can warrant a criminal investigation, and in most cases police just take liberties on the subject and search them without consent.

Grown adults with a gun and a badge, walking up to 15 year olds and demanding identification from them because they are walking through a neighbourhood, or hanging our with a couple of friends is not my idea of community policing. This carding debate has been thrown all over the place in different directions, but the reality is our Toronto Police Service has engaged in the practice of detaining innocent African-Canadians in the hopes that they will obtain some piece of information that allows them to conduct a search, make an arrest, or even use physical force.

Since I have come forward about my experiences being stopped and harassed by police based on the colour of my skin, so many other voices have reached out to me to share their stories. The stories I have been told are all alarming, and I am always on the border of disbelief because of how outrageous and demeaning the behavior is from those that are sworn to protect us.

What is even more disturbing than the physical abuse, and intimidation that takes place by the Toronto Police Service towards the African-Canadian community, is the database that houses millions of pages of personal information on non-criminal encounters. This data is so inherently dangerous because of the inferences that can be drawn based on the account of a single officer.

If the police were to stop me on the street and ask me to produce identification I have the constitutional right not to, and I have the human right not to. I know I would still engage in a conversation with the officer as to why do they need it, and if the officer could articulate a reason that was justifiable then I could consider assisting. However, what usually happens is that the only reason is the colour of my skin, and the officer is hoping that I am on probation, have a previous arrest record, or that I may be violating curfew. If the officer can establish this then there is a possible arrest, and with a high enough arrest record there is a chance of a promotion. That is what has driven this carding campaign, as it is admitted by officers that quotas were given for contact cards just as they were for traffic tickets.

Now if we have our police service targeting a segment of our society knowing that the repercussions for violations in procedure are minimal in order for personal advancement, then we have something seriously wrong. And I haven’t even mentioned that fact that a good portion of our officers come from outside regions that do not have much diversity, which may contribute to the racial biases that creep into police behaviour.

My experience has a twist to the normal carding scenario which even makes it more deplorable and questionable. Out of the 10 official cards I have, there is only one occasion where I knew the information requested was going to be entered into a database. The other nine times were traffic stops where if they were warranted I would receive a ticket, but while the ticket is being written, the officer is writing a suspect description that include by clothing, height, weight, and notes about our interaction. In contrast when a freedom of information request was done for a Caucasian female called subject A there were traffic tickets for similar offences such as an expired tag, but no entry into the Field Information Report (FIR) database that houses all of this carding data we are speaking of.

The collection of intelligence on the African-Canadian community in the GTA is a symptom of targeted systemic racism, and when Chief Saunders states he does not support random stops, it must be noted that stopping African-Canadians is not random, it is premeditated and targeted, therefore it is systemic discrimination and illegal.

No one in this city is opposed to police investigating crimes, or engaging the community, those are things that we need to keep our communities safe. What we are opposed to is the practice of officers seeing young Black men and feeling like it is an opportunity to get some excitement in for the day by challenging the youth and asking them questions in order to have a pretext for an arrest or an altercation.

It is sad because I wish what I am describing was not the reality, and to be honest I am being very reserved when I describe what happens on the ground, but it is a part of corruption within our society that we must eliminate. Good officers put their lives on the line daily to protect the public, their reputations should not be tarnished by those that violate the public trust.

We have the police that do not ever want to admit that they have done something wrong, but they have to accept responsibility for not holding officers to account for their violations. Our political community, especially our councilors, mayor and chief cannot ignore the voices of the community that have said over and over that lives are being destroyed through the practice of carding which is immoral, illegal and dehumanizing.

If the average Torontonian were to be the subject of suspicion, aggression, and restriction of freedom on a daily basis, they would finally understand what it feels like to be carded, arbitrarily detained, and helpless.

I have launched this Charter application because the political mechanisms have failed to protect the community. The law is clear on the subject, therefore we must go to the law and adjudicate the retention of illegally collected inaccurate data.

The information kept does not fight or prevent crime, what it does in engage and keep a system running that is being fed off the misery of those who are already disadvantaged.

We can do better Toronto, innocent people should not be subject to living in a police state similar to apartheid South Africa where a passbook is required to travel from region to region.

This is Canada, a place the world looks to for its fairness and progress. Let's keep working together to make this change for the better.

— Singh is president of the Osgoode Society Against Institutional Injustice