At its meeting this Thursday the Toronto Police Services Board will be considering its response to Ontario’s “request for feedback on police street checks public awareness.”

“Street checks,” better known as “carding,” is the practice of police officers questioning people who are not suspected of having committed any crime and are not thought to have knowledge of any particular criminal activity. The officers record the information they obtain about the person. The filing of cards containing such information gave the practice its name.

The province is presently asking police services to comment on “public awareness” of its recent regulation on carding. However, the Toronto Police Services Board is virtually ignoring a report, paid for and commissioned by the board itself, which clearly implies carding should be abolished.

A little background. In 2010, the Toronto Star reported on its detailed study of six years of carding of hundreds of thousands of people by Toronto Police. The study demonstrated that black people had been carded three times as often as others had been, although only about 8.4 per cent of the residents of Toronto were black.

The Toronto Star’s headlines could not be ignored. Over the past seven years, the Toronto Police board has spent an enormous amount of time, effort and money trying to find ways that carding could be regulated so it does not entail racial profiling and violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Many people argued that carding had to be abolished since it would be harmful no matter what regulations were imposed. The police board adopted several different policies but refused to ban the practice. The Province of Ontario enacted a regulation that still permits carding and is now asking all Ontario police services to comment on the public’s awareness of this regulation.

Late last year, the board retained highly respected criminologists Anthony Doob and Rosemary Gartner to research the effectiveness of carding. Doob and Gartner presented their extensive report to the board on March 23. The Doob-Gartner Report contains a thorough analysis of many studies on the benefits and harms of carding in many jurisdictions.

They conclude that evidence of any benefit is “substantially outweighed by convincing evidence of the harm of such practices both to the person subject to them and to the long term and overall relationship of the police to the community.”

Numerous deputations to the board over the past seven years have provided a large amount of anecdotal evidence of such harms; the Doob-Gartner report establishes the harms and the lack of significant benefits beyond any reasonable doubt. In responding to questions from board members, Doob made it clear that carding causes those harms even if the officers involved behave impeccably.

There is only one reasonable response to the Doob-Gartner report: immediately end carding. However, unless public pressure mounts, it is very unlikely the police board will do so.

The minutes of the March 23 meeting state: “The Board received the presentation and thanked Professor Doob and Professor Gartner for their research. The Board said that the Regulated Interaction with the Community and the Collection of Identifying Information Policy will evolve over time and believes that the research will assist it in assessing the Policy.”

But professors Doob and Gartner HAVE thoroughly assessed the policy, and have unequivocally concluded the practice is harmful, regardless of the details of the policy. It is irresponsible to let it “evolve over time.”

The board has continued to allow carding because police chiefs have insisted it is useful. However, the Doob-Gartner study establishes that “it is easy to exaggerate the usefulness of these stops, and hard to find data that supports the usefulness of continuing to carry them out.”

We cannot blame the police for the continuation of carding; it is natural for police officers to want as much surveillance power as they can get. But we can blame those who are responsible for civilian control of the police. Members of the Toronto Police Services Board, including Mayor John Tory, can and should be blamed if they allow carding to continue in spite of the compelling conclusions of the Doob-Gartner report.

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If carding is not completely stopped, there will be many additional harms to police-community relations, many more expenses in carrying out and regulating the practice, continued debates and a number of law suits. Enough already!