Peel Police Chief Jennifer Evans has refused to suspend carding, ignoring her police board's instruction to halt the controversial practice until further review.

“Street checks will continue in Peel,” Evans told the board, moments after board members voted 4-3 to suspend the practice.

The board was advised that due to Police Act restrictions on its involvement with operational functions of the police, it could not force Evans to suspend street checks, also known as carding.

Instead, they “recommended” Evans suspend the practice. She promptly said no, stating that carding is an important tool to help solve and prevent crimes.

“Our directives are legally sound,” Evans told the board, while presenting a report on street checks and outlining changes the force is making to better educate officers and collect accurate data on carding. She stated that the force's street checks do not violate Charter of Rights protections against unfair detention and search and seizure.

But a half-dozen delegates to the board disagreed, describing how street checks in Mississauga and Peel are “deeply damaging black youth,” according to one speaker.

Anyone who is being carded can legally walk away from police.

Data obtained by the Star shows that over six years, from 2009 to 2014, the force conducted 159,303 street checks. Black people were involved in 21 per cent of the force's street checks, but accounted for 9 per cent of the population of Brampton and Mississauga in 2011, according to census data. The data shows that blacks were three times more likely to be stopped in a street check than whites.

Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie, who along with Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey led the push to suspend the practice, read directly from a street check report produced Thursday by departing Ontario ombudsman André Marin.

“Stopping citizens without an objective and reasonable basis for believing that they may be implicated in a recent or ongoing criminal offence, or where there are reasonable and probable grounds to arrest them, is unconstitutional — it’s a form of arbitrary detention contrary to section 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

“Those are damning words,” Crombie said after the meeting.

Jeffrey said the issue is not going away. “I can feel the temperature rising on this issue every single day in my community,” she said.

In her earlier presentation, Evans anecdotally offered six examples of crimes that were solved with the help of street checks, providing few details.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“The problem for us is it can't be anecdotal,” Jeffrey told Evans. “We need the business case.” She told Evans that if she was going to defend the practice as a crime-fighting tool, “actual data and metrics on the number of crimes solved using street checks” have to be produced.

Asked why blacks were stopped so disproportionately in street checks by her force, Evans responded: “I don't know. That's why I'm going to continue conducting the review and we're going to get out and start talking to our officers.”

Read more about: