The TTC has suspended the practice of having its transit officers collect personal information from people who are issued warnings on the transit system, following a Star investigation that raised privacy and discrimination concerns about the policy.

The transit agency announced in mid-March that officers would stop using specialized police-style forms to collect the information, but at the time TTC CEO Rick Leary said they would still record riders’ personal details in their notebooks, pending the outcome of an internal review of the policy.

However, at a meeting of the TTC board on Wednesday, Alan Cakebread, the head of the agency’s enforcement unit, revealed his officers are no longer recording the information at all.

“We’ve stopped collecting any of that data until the review of the program is complete,” he said. The agency is expected to report back to the board in July with the outcome of the review, which will examine the TTC’s need to take riders’ personal information, and how it is used and retained.

Transit agency spokesperson Stuart Green confirmed that Cakebread directed officers to stop collecting the data on March 27, two weeks after Leary announced the discontinuation of the specialized forms.

“In the meantime, if a warning is issued it is (issued) verbally and used as a teachable moment for the customer,” Green said. Officers are still issuing tickets for fare evasion and other offences as normal.

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The Star first reported in March on transit officers’ collection of riders’ personal information, which has been regular agency practice for years but has faced little public scrutiny or oversight from the TTC board.

When transit enforcement officers or fare inspectors suspect a customer of committing fare evasion or another offence, they have the option of issuing a warning instead of a ticket. In such cases it has been TTC policy for the officers to take down riders’ personal information such as their name, date of birth, address and race and enter it into a database. The information stays in the database for 20 years, and the passenger is given no record of the interaction.

The agency has said the system allows them to identify potential repeat offenders and determine whether a rider deserves a ticket or merely a warning.

Through a freedom of information request, the Star obtained redacted details from the database spanning nearly 11 years, during which time officers entered personal details from caution cards more than 40,000 times.

Of the entries for which the person’s race was recorded, 19.3 per cent were identified as Black. Just 10.7 of people in Toronto who commute by public transit are Black, according to the 2016 census. Customers listed as white were also over represented in the database, but to a much lesser extent.

The over-representation of Black riders, as well as the fact the TTC retains the data for two decades, raised concerns among privacy and civil rights experts, who compared the practice to police “carding.”

The comparison was heightened by the fact TTC officers used the same Toronto Police Service forms to collect the data that the police formerly used to conduct controversial street checks. After the police discontinued use of the form, the TTC continued to use it, then created its own version that was nearly identical in many respects.

The TTC has firmly denied it has engaged in “carding” or any form of discrimination.

Councillor and TTC commissioner Shelley Carroll (Ward 17, Don Valley North), who moved the motion asking for a report on the agency’s data collection at a meeting of the board last month, said it was good that officers were no longer collecting personal information through cautions. But she argued that it’s more important that the TTC quickly establish firm guidelines around how it collects riders’ data that will protect passenger privacy and guard against discriminatory practices.

The requirement for such a policy is all the more pressing because the TTC is hiring more inspectors as it faces a fare evasion problem that the city’s auditor general determined cost it $61 million in lost revenue last year, Carroll stated.

“There has to be a policy on file,” she said. “It all has to be wrapped in regulation.”

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She said transit officers could have legitimate reasons to record the personal details of someone who may be breaking the rules on the transit system. But she said riders should be given a record of the interaction, and be offered an easy way to check what information about them the TTC has on file.

She also said there’s no reason for the agency to keep the information on file for so long.

“I fail to see what having the address of someone that you had a conversation with 20 years ago can solve.”