A group of Toronto professionals and academics who belong to the Anti-Black Racism Network are joining a growing chorus of activists calling for an end to police carding.

And the group is searching for answers as to why, in an information age, police have the technology to gather the data but don’t have the statistics to defend it.

“We have yet to be provided evidence that carding impacts crime in any shape or fashion,” Rinaldo Walcott, an associate professor at U of T said at a press conference Wednesday. “We have yet to be provided evidence that the database developed from carding impacts crime and its resolution in any way or shape.

“We find this totally unacceptable in the age of information,” said Walcott. “We believe that by ignoring available evidence, that the mayor, the Toronto Police Service and its board have clearly declared black communities collectively a public safety threat.

“The only way to think of such a declaration is to call it anti-black racism.”

Walcott was joined by Anthony Morgan of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, Ryerson University professor Akua Benjamin, Pascale Diverlus who is vice-president of United Black Students Ryerson and a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto and academic Chris Williams, a vocal opponent of carding.

The group is asking for meetings with new police chief Mark Saunders, Mayor John Tory (open John Tory's policard) and Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Toronto police defend carding — during which people are stopped and documented in mostly non-criminal encounters — as an invaluable intelligence-gathering tool and say they police high crime areas of the city and not by race.

“We know our interactions with the community help keep neighbourhoods safe,” said TPS spokesperson Meaghan Gray in an email “We will do our jobs as police officers while honouring a person’s rights and explaining our roles and responsibilities. We will not abolish the practice of interacting with members of the public; but we will redefine the purpose for which we do.”

A Star investigation published in 2012 found that between 2008 and mid-2011, the number of individual young black men, aged 15 to 24, who were “carded” was 3.4 times greater than the city’s population of young black men.

Fewer than one in five (15.6 per cent) of 788,050 individuals who were carded during that time had been arrested between 2002 and mid-2011.

Rights activists say the police practice violates the Charter and amounts to an arbitrary detention.

The police board passed a carding policy last month — called community engagement — that was devoid of the citizen right protections that dozens of activists have called for, including one that would have asked officers to inform people of their right to walk away.

That right was in the news this week after Justice Frederick Myers awarded Mutaz Elmardy $27,000 in damages after he was randomly stopped in Moss Park in January, 2011 and unlawfully arrested and punched in the face by a Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) officer because of non-co-operation.

A police spokesperson said a probe by the Office of the Independent Police Review Director found Elmardy’s complaints against the officer were unsubstantiated.

A Star investigation found TAVIS officers card at the highest rates.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

This year, the Toronto Police Service is deferring its summer TAVIS initiative, when officers would normally be deployed to areas of the city where there has been violence.

“There is no one specific reason” for the deferral this summer, said Gray. “Between the Pan Am Games and other Community Safety Command projects, staffing for the (Neighbourhood TAVIS Initiative) was going to be challenging.”