I’ve written a few times about police accountability in the past month, and some small percentage of the response I’ve gotten by email and phone has suggested I am a knee-jerk, anti-police hothead secretly in league with gangsters and criminals. I think that misinterprets what I’m getting at — I am vocal about problems specifically because I want and expect an effective police force that we can trust, and I believe the vast majority of rank-and-file officers are likely worthy of that expectation.

But fine, I have been a critic of the cops at times, especially the executives who lead the force. Still, I don’t think I have ever suggested that our front-line police officers are stupid or incapable, as Mike McCormack, the head of the Toronto Police Association, who represents members of the force, sometimes seems to suggest they must be.

To wit: after the guilty finding on the charge of attempted murder against Const. James Forcillo, McCormack stood on the courthouse steps and worried about how this verdict “sends a chilling message to our members, and that’s going to be a challenge for our frontline members....” Which message would his members find chilling and challenging? The message that they should not attempt to murder people?

And there he’s been again, over the past few days, suggesting that a spike in gun crime this month can be attributed to the end of the practice of random “carding” last year. “Our members aren’t out there engaging with the public like they used to because of broad changes to street checks,” he was quoted as saying in the Toronto Sun after a public double-shooting in Chinatown over the weekend. “Because of this, we don’t have the ability to investigate like we used to.”

It’s worth noting that Staff Insp. Greg McLane, head of the homicide division, has not suggested any carding-related spike in homicides. In addressing reporters Tuesday, he said the higher than usual number of shootings is “concerning, but I look on it as a bit of an anomaly,” in that the shootings appear to bear no connection to each other, and he appealed not for a return to random street checks but for voluntary information from anyone who saw or knows what happened in these cases. He asked for help in gathering intelligence, in other words.

Which McCormack seemed to suggest is prevented by a prohibition on carding. Debating the issue with Toronto Star columnist and anti-carding activist Desmond Cole on CityNews Monday, McCormack — after noting that there are many factors involved in crime, and that it’s hard to isolate one — said the prohibition on carding means, “What I’m hearing from my members is, there is no pro-active policing engagement right now, there isn’t intelligence gathering.”

If what he’s hearing from his members about that is true, it is distressing. But it is not clear why that alleged shutdown of all police work is a result of ending the practice of carding.

You may remember from the detailed debate about this issue last year that carding, as a police practice that the police board and the provincial government determined must stop, is the random, arbitrary stopping of people for no defined public safety purpose, and the documenting of that stop in a record containing the person’s identification. It was two defining factors of “carding” that made it a problem: arbitrariness (which appears to have led to widespread discriminatory and biased application), and disconnection from any known or suspected wrongdoing.

The investigation of homicide is a very well-defined public safety purpose. The gathering of intelligence about criminal gangs is a well-defined public-safety purpose. Finding information about illegal gun smuggling, sales, and ownership is a well-defined public-safety purpose. There is nothing random or arbitrary about these practices. They are not carding — or at least, they are not the form of carding that was subject to public controversy.

(This kind of confusion seems endemic among police defenders of carding: the highest-profile specific defence of the practice, from Peel Regional Police Chief Jennifer Evans, involved the explanation of how an officer documenting the investigation of a call about suspected illegal fishing led to a break in the case of the murder of Cecilia Zhang. Notice, there was no arbitrary, random stop for undefined purposes. The officer was investigating a specific suspicion based on a call about a possible crime in progress. Nothing anti-carding activists have demanded would have prevented that scenario from playing out exactly as it did.)

The claim that intelligence-gathering and criminal investigation must be shut down entirely if some public safety purpose must guide those processes is bizarre. It suggests that police can think of no better method of preventing and solving crimes than randomly stopping and questioning people for no reason, and recording all that random information.

That is worse than suggesting they don’t have a clue. It is suggesting that they don’t know how to look for clues and follow them. That they may not even know what a clue is.

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That’s not me suggesting that, mind you. It is the head of the Toronto Police Association, leveling a more devastating criticism than I’ve heard from any activist critics in a long time.