I don’t recall when exactly I dissolved into despair over the corrosive impact of carding, or street checks, or driving while black or racial profiling. They are all fruits of the same tree where I live.

But I know that, by 2015, my sons had made it clear they expect police to treat them differently than the neighbours.

Such were their lived experiences, as productive members of society who dutifully followed the rules, didn’t run with gangsters or sleep with criminals.

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A Black member of the Toronto police services board once described how many in the Black community see patrolling cops as an occupying army.

The harsh characterization caused a massive firestorm.

But he knew what he was talking about.

Read more:

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‘Stops must be based on more than a hunch or Spidey sense,’ says judge in charge of report on street checks

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How Doug Ford keeps playing the carding game with cops

Premier Ford can support ‘the people’ by ending police carding

It was during the carding controversy at the police services board, when Chief Bill Blair refused to write regulations taming the more offensive aspects of carding, clauses the board had passed, that the sheer awfulness of institutionalized anti-Black racism closed in on my brain.

I remember thinking, “My very presence is considered a threat. I am deemed less than human.”

And worse, my sons and their Black friends were more pessimistic than I was about their status in this city and this world.

When some prominent Torontonians descended on city hall and called out Mayor John Tory, demanding he put an end to this odious practice, I felt some relief.

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Yes, it took unprecedented intervention on a matter of basic human rights, but, at least, there was intervention.

My city was not beyond reclamation.

It took provincial legislation to force police to stop carding — the most outrageous policing practice of, namely, random and arbitrary stopping and questioning and harassment of citizens to collect their personal information and storing it in a data base — for no other reason than to feed the data beast.

The Star had published reports showing that in some areas of the city Black citizens were 17 times more likely to be carded; that police do racially profile black citizens, at a rate four times greater than they do white citizens.

The Toronto Police Association’s response was to bring a lawsuit against the Star and question the paper’s math and science.

So it’s been pretty wrenching to watch the same association this past week claiming never to have supported random street checks, mouths brimming with dissembling and misstatements.

Peel police, whose chief, now retired, refused to yield to demands from Mayors Bonnie Crombie and Lynda Jeffery to end the practice, were out again this week claiming blithely never to have practiced random street checks.

About the same time, Donald Trump was claiming he didn’t say Mexico would pay for the wall.

Call it what you will, hairsplitting: all across the GTA, Black, brown, Indigenous, people of the lower economic classes are victims of discriminatory policing.

On the matter of how police interact with citizens to get information that might help them keep us safe, we have one last chance to get it right.

Justice Michael Tulloch has prepared a comprehensive, cogent, heartfelt, optimistic report on how to move ahead and maybe show the world that, as Canadians, we are different.

My reaction is best described as one of anxiety; angst bordering on despair.

The best I can muster today is: “Thanks for the baby steps.”

Now watch the Ford government strategize where they will erode the tiny gains, using veiled legislative language concealed as safety measures protecting the people.

I hope I’m wrong.

Justice Tulloch is obviously hopeful. He has explained all the issues, cleared up the confusion between “street checks” and bad street checks and carding, and shown a clear path forward.

To even suggest a return of the destructive heavy-handed and discriminatory police tactics such as the hated TAVIS, is to prove we have learned nothing.

To claim that unchecked street checks are what police need to stop gun crimes in Toronto is to be wilfully ignorant and deaf.

Justice Tulloch explodes that myth.

Carding, itself, may have done more to increase crime than the ending of carding, his report says.

To ignore the report and suggest that it should be shelved because it was the damnable Wynne Liberals who brought in the regulations that they asked Tulloch to review would be a historic failure.

The messenger is as credible as they come; Tulloch was appointed to the Superior Court in 2003. Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper named him to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2012. He is the highest ranking Black judge — the only one — on an appellate court in the country. He’s highly respected.

He’s telling us we can show the world how to do community policing in a way that fosters respect and co-operation between police and the Black community.

Premier Doug Ford, who claims to have done more for Black Ontarians that any other politician, and says he is a man of the people, would be wise to surprise his detractors and implement Tulloch’s recommendations.