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That policy means most instances of carding—perhaps the most contentious issue in Toronto policing at the moment—will go unrecorded during the trial.

That doesn’t please Andray Domise, who ran for city council last year and has since emerged as a leading critic on race and policing in Toronto.

“That’s almost comical to me,” he said. The whole idea of body cameras, Domise believed, was to take the ambiguity out of police interactions with the public. If officers can pick and choose when the cameras roll, that makes whole the process “completely pointless,” he said.

Domise said he’s not a fan of police cameras necessarily, but if they are to be used, he said, they should be used universally.

Carding, whereby officers stop people not under arrest or investigation and record their information in a database, has come under intense fire in the last year. Activists say it overwhelming targets young black men and amounts to racial profiling or outright racism by the police.

Police Chief Mark Saunders has been dogged by questions on carding since he was first announced as the city’s new top cop last month. He has repeatedly implied in interviews that the practice is an important tool for fighting gangs and protecting public safety.

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Asked if carding incidents would be filmed during the body camera trial, police spokesperson Meaghan Gray replied: “Carding means different things to different people.

“If you’re talking about an investigative detention or an arrest, that would be part of that investigative nature. But the community engagements that we’re talking about or the informal interactions that we have with the public, no it’s not turned on.”