HALIFAX—The city’s chief of police will apologize to Black Haligonians for street checks next Friday.

Halifax Regional Police Chief Dan Kinsella told the board of police commissioners on Monday that the apology is scheduled for Nov. 29. After the meeting, he told reporters it will happen at 11 a.m. at the Halifax Central Library on Spring Garden Road.

Street checks — the police practice of either randomly stopping someone and asking for their identification or observing someone from afar and entering their information into a database — were banned across Nova Scotia last month after a former chief justice determined they were illegal.

At last month’s police board meeting, Kinsella announced he’d be apologizing to the African Nova Scotian community, not just for street checks but for “some 200 years of inequalities and injustice.”

“That apology needs to be to the community that it’s designed for,” Kinsella said on Monday.

He said the force has sent out invitations to African Nova Scotians he’s been talking to, and there will be more going out soon.

As for the wording, he’s still working on it.

“As you can imagine, there’s a lot of sensitivities around it,” he said. “We know it is a powerful way to move forward, but it’s much more than just the apology. It’s the post-apology work that we will build into the plan to make sure that collectively, we can move forward.”

RCMP brass at Monday’s meeting said the force is still in the process of deciding whether to apologize. The provincial justice minister told reporters earlier this month that he’d be apologizing, but he hadn’t set a date and offered few details.

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