Five days after the New Year’s Eve ball drop of a 300-plus page review of carding and police street checks in Ontario, Justice Michael Tulloch and his team met with reporters and the public Friday to talk about its results and recommendations at a downtown Toronto hotel that is a brisk 10-minute walk away from the politics of Queen’s Park.

Unsaid by Tulloch himself, but noted by others, is that the report is now in the hands of the province, and what comes of it is dependent on political will and the Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Doug Ford.

“We have every confidence that they are going to move forward in good faith, but ultimately it’s up to them to decide” how to act on the report, Jaclyn McNamara, one of three legal counsels to Tulloch, told a conference room at the Chelsea Hotel packed with rights advocates, the public and police brass from several Ontario police services.

Tulloch’s review is one of four highly critical major reports into policing released within the past month, including a review of the Thunder Bay Police Service by the Office of the Independent Police Review Director and an interim report by the Ontario Human Rights Commission in its ongoing inquiry into racial profiling and discrimination by the Toronto Police Service.

The common thread to all of them is that none of the findings were news to Black and Indigenous communities in Toronto and the province.

“The police are the public, and the public are the police,” said Tulloch, referring to one of the guiding tenets of Sir Robert Peel’s Principles of Policing, during a well-received hour-long overview of his report, including findings that made a clear distinction between valuable street checks and valueless and harmful random “carding,” and more than 100 recommendations.

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The Peel principle guided him in his review. In order to maintain safety, there must be community and police co-operation, said Tulloch, who admitted he was not sure before he began his review what constituted a legitimate street check, and found others were confused as well.

Tulloch, a respected Ontario Court of Appeal justice, and his team consulted with more than 2,200 people, including representatives from 34 police services, and received more than 100 written submissions.

He told those gathered that he soon learned the scope of the issue, and how it disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous and racialized groups, and creates mistrust of police.

Tulloch’s report stressed the importance of training and making it clear to police what is expected of them in street check encounters, where “carding” — the complete randomness in choosing who to stop, question and document, and creating “a database for general intelligence purposes” — has no place.

“What one person finds suspicious, another person may not,” said Tulloch. He stressed at the news conference that stakeholders, including police and the public, must read the entire report and understand the context of street checks and random carding — or groundless street checks — and how confusion has led to the “state that we’re in.”

“Stops must be based on more than a hunch or ‘Spidey sense,’” said Tulloch, eliciting chuckles.

But police must be able to engage with the communities they police, and citizens not feel “as though their name is being requested to appear in a police database.”

Stops should not be made on the basis of race or other prohibited grounds of discrimination, including socio-economic status, Tulloch said.

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Many of the recommendations are aimed at tweaking and adding language to provincially mandated street check regulations enacted in 2017, in order to clarify and clear up any confusion on the part of police, the public and their civilian overseers. Of the 103 recommendations, several suggest the regulations should:

Expressly state that they do not apply to “attempts to confirm the identity of an individual who matches the description of a missing person, human trafficking victim or other victim of crime” or to “interactions that have a community-building purpose, meaning on-duty police contact with members of the community meant to foster positive relationships and/or assist members of the public without gathering identifying information for an investigative or intelligence purpose.”

Define “suspicious activity” to mean an activity where, under all of the circumstances, there are objective, credible grounds to request identifying information.

Direct and train officers who have identified suspicious activity and if it is “feasible to do so, a police officer should first make inquiries of an individual to confirm or dispel the officer’s suspicion without requesting identifying information.”

Tulloch also recommends consistency in police street check training and data collection, and police-community collaboration on future training that should focus on “adolescent development, the local realities of the police service in question, the application of the regulation for real world scenarios and a general focus on the ability to articulate reasons” for checks, he told those gathered.

Street checks, done right, and for the right reasons, have value, said Tulloch.

But to underscore just how out-of-hand “carding” or random street check encounters — with no investigative value — had become, he spoke about recent times when street checks and quotas were used by some services in officer performance reviews.

People were stopped “because they were available on the street to be stopped,” he said.

“The process sank so low that police officers, and I say, some ... began to record names and birth dates off headstones in cemeteries, and submit it as street check data,” said Tulloch, adding that some people being carded offered up names of other, real people they presumably didn’t like.

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“As a result, the quality and reliability of the collected information was extremely poor,” said Tulloch, creating in part a list of the “walking dead.”

Tulloch ended his remarks without taking questions, leaving those to his lawyers. Many of the questions came from activists and other guests, and honed in on issues outside the mandate of Tulloch’s review, such as what kind of oversight and accountability could there be for police interactions that fall outside the street check regulations.

There was also skepticism over whether the government will act on the report.

“This is in their hands at this time,” said Kingsley Gilliam of the Black Action Defence Committee. “Justice Tulloch has met his requirements ... and its going to be up to each and every one of us in this room to make sure that Doug Ford” acts on it.

Shortly after coming to power, the Progressive Conservative government hit the pause button on a police reform bill that included wide-ranging changes, including enhancements to the province’s civilian Special Investigation Unit, a law brought in by the previous Liberal government in response to another of Tulloch’s reports on police oversight. The Conservatives are reviewing the bill, and intend to introduce a bill of their own.

In reaction to Tulloch’s latest report, Sylvia Jones, the minister who oversees policing, said this week that the government will review it. Jones said “new police legislation will reflect a simple principle: racism and discrimination have no place in policing. Justice Tulloch’s report will inform our work as we fix Ontario’s policing legislation.”

Between 2010 and 2014, repeated Toronto Star analysis of Toronto police street check and carding data, obtained through freedom of information requests, has shown that Black people were more likely in each of the city’s 70-plus patrol zones to be stopped, questioned and documented than white people, and more so in predominantly white areas of the city.

While Black and, to a lesser extent, brown-skinned people were subject to higher rates of street checks, compared to what they represent in Toronto’s population, people with white skin colour represented the largest skin colour group, by sheer volume, in street check data examined by the Star. Many of those stopped, regardless of skin colour, were for “general investigation” purposes.

Between 2008 and 2012, police filled out 1.8 million contact cards, involving more than a million individuals. At its peak in Toronto in 2012, police filled out 400,000 contact cards. The practice dropped off dramatically in mid-2013 when officers were first required to produce receipts for the encounters. Toronto police suspended street checks involving the inputting of personal details into a database in 2015.

Similar street check racial patterns to Toronto’s emerged in other Ontario police jurisdictions, leading to the enactment of the province-wide regulations.

Tulloch made a point of addressing in his report that, based on available yearly data, the assertion by some that a drop in street checks caused a spike in shootings is “spurious.”

“Police remain entitled to approach people and question them without asking for identifying information, without triggering the regulation. Police are entitled to search people for weapons where they reasonably suspect that the person is carrying a weapon,” said Tulloch.

“None of these important police powers have been taken away or impacted by the regulation. The only thing that has changed is that when a police officer requests a person’s identifying information with less than reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, there has to be a good, justifiable reason for the request.”

In a statement, Mayor John Tory, said he’s “been clear that arbitrarily stopping people, often in the past predominantly young, Black men who have done nothing wrong, does not make us safer, is inconsistent with our basic rights as Canadians and only damages public trust in the police.

“Justice Tulloch has concluded that there is little to no evidence that a random, unfocused collection of identifying information has benefits that outweigh the social cost of the practice.

“The police, however, have a difficult job to do and an important challenge arising out of this report will be to educate the public and officers about circumstances in which the police can and must stop people when there are grounds to do so.”

Also in a statement, the Ontario Association of Police Services Boards, said Friday that Tulloch’s review “concludes that there are still many challenges to achieving bias-free policing. This is something that everyone must take seriously, if we are ever to become the free society we portend.

“Clearly there is a significant role for police boards in this evolution by setting the tone at the top, appropriately representing all of the community, establishing meaningful police policies, and ensuring real progress within their police services.”

Tulloch “rightly highlights that police can only be effective if they have the trust of the community they serve,” read the statement. “The Streets Checks Regulation was introduced because some practises by some police services were discriminatory and therefore inappropriate, and more importantly: nobody was doing anything about it.”