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Edmonton police say they will keep conducting street checks after an independent report found no evidence to conclude the force’s use of the practice amounts to racial profiling.

But the 306-page report on carding said there is confusion about street checks, and calls for more transparency from law enforcement.

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Simon Fraser University’s Curt Griffiths said in the police commission-funded study on carding it’s “not possible” to conclude officers racially discriminate against people who are stopped by police, asked for identification and questioned despite not being suspected of a crime.

The finding diverges from conclusions reached one year ago by local Black Lives Matter activists based on data they said showed black and Indigenous Edmontonians are disproportionately carded by police.

Griffiths, a criminology professor, said he couldn’t make that claim based on his own review of internal carding reports. The problem, he said, is data which he characterized as “contaminated” with each officer’s subjective assessments as well as a half-dozen other types of police calls that were not in his opinion street checks.