Travelling on the streetcar Thursday, I noticed that my fellow passenger was reading the newspaper report on the statement issued the day before by a group of prominent Torontonians who came together to call for an end to police carding. They called the practice discriminatory and socially corrosive. The man said, “You are Dr. Mukherjee, chair of the police board.” I said yes, and we had a brief conversation. He was middle aged, a school teacher and black. He was well informed about the Toronto police board’s efforts to establish a policy on carding.

He told me that as a young man in the 1970s, he had been stopped and carded several times. He wanted the practice to stop, summing up his feeling about the non-implementation of the policy approved by the board on April 24, 2014 in one word — “disgusting.” This, coming from a mild-mannered, soft-spoken resident of Toronto, a high school teacher, shook me.

That I would run into this high school teacher was a coincidence. Only Wednesday afternoon, I was at a high school participating in a panel discussion on carding. It was a mixed race audience of young men and women. When asked by a panel member whether any of them had been stopped by police when walking or standing in their neighbourhoods, many hands shot up. When asked how many of them had been stopped more than once, almost every hand remained up. They were all black youth.

These were two “random contacts” I had in less than 24 hours. They have left me profoundly disturbed and caused me to think hard about an issue that was raised so powerfully by the group of concerned citizens who called for an end to carding.

I believe the Toronto police services board must now declare unequivocally that information generated from informal contacts with members of the public, which are not related to any criminal investigation or likelihood of a criminal investigation, must not be recorded in any police database. I understand that such information will be recorded in the memo book of the officer who made the contact, but it should remain there.

I say this as one member of the police board and a concerned resident of this city, who believes that the board is the steward of the public interest and provides governance on behalf of the community.

I am a supporter of intelligence-based policing. However, I completely agree with our new chief of police, Mark Saunders, that there is no place in policing for what he calls “random practices” of information gathering, practices that are not focused or based on a valid purpose.

As the conversations with my fellow passenger yesterday and the students Wednesday show, we are dealing with a practice that has been part of policing for a very long time and continues to bedevil relations between racialized residents of this city and the police today.

The notion that information about innocent citizens not engaged in or suspected of any wrongdoing is ending up and residing in police databases forever to be used in ways that could jeopardize their safety and future is deeply offensive. There is no justification for this practice to continue. Even Chief Saunders agrees.

So, let us get on with it and create the conditions that make sure that residents of Toronto engage with police officers willingly and voluntarily in the knowledge that information from interactions in non-arrest, nondetention situations will not end up perpetually in police databases. Governments are requiring more and more information about ordinary people to be collected and retained. We are at the risk of turning into a surveillance society.

At least here in Toronto, let us say clearly that we will not let this city turn into a surveillance society against those who live here because of their race, ethnicity, skin colour, age or socio-economic status. That is not consistent with the values we cherish through our motto, “Diversity Our Strength.”

Alok Mukherjee is chair of the Toronto Police Services Board.

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