The chair of the Toronto Police Services Board is recommending swift changes to carding — the controversial police practice of documenting personal details of citizens stopped in encounters that typically involve no arrest or charge.

The board is “obligated” to direct police Chief Bill Blair to make the changes, which build upon and toughen recommendations already brought forth by police, Alok Mukherjee wrote in a lengthy report made public Monday. The report is in advance of a special board meeting Nov. 18.

The board, wrote Mukherjee, “must now take action to deal with the continuing discriminatory impact” of carding. Repeated Star analyses of police data have shown the practice disproportionately affects black and “brown” people.

Mukherjee’s report, which includes an overview of several decades’ worth of reports and studies on racial profiling and tension over police stops in Toronto, makes 18 recommendations.

Among them, Mukherjee urges the board to direct police to:

Immediately examine existing contact-card data and purge personal data that do not appear to have been collected for a “bona fide” investigative reason, and otherwise, purge the data after five years. (The police plan would do so after seven). Between 2008 and 2012, police filled out 1.8 million contact cards, documenting personal details of more than a million people.

Only record personal details of encounters with citizens when there are clear investigative purposes for a stop, and keep only details that are “demonstrably relative” to “specific police investigations.” The Star found the most common reason cited by officers in contact card stops was “general investigation.”

Stop using contact-card counts in officer performance reviews — something the Toronto Police Association also wants — but use the card data to look for possible patterns of racial bias among officers who do similar jobs.

Immediately conduct an evaluation of the service’s Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) to see if its practices are in compliance with the Police Services Act, the Ontario Human Rights Code and the board’s own policies. The provincially funded unit was Blair’s response to a spate of gun violence in 2005. It is deployed in neighbourhoods experiencing violent crime.

While police say it has reduced violent crime in those areas, it has also caused considerable tension and led to dangerous moments, such as a 2011 gunpoint police stop on Neptune Dr. of four teens on their way to an evening educational program.

Police, on their own initiative and without board input, launched an internal review of carding practices in March 2012 and came out in October 2013, with a 95-page report called the “Police and Community Engagement Review.” It contains 31 recommendations and a plan to roll them out over the next two years, after which there would be an independent compliance audit.

Mukherjee’s plan also calls for an audit and timely reporting to the board on carding data, but he wants swift action on an old problem. Disproportionate stops of blacks by Toronto police, he noted in his report, was highlighted in the mid-’90s by University of Toronto criminologist Scot Wortley, and it has surfaced again and again in later Star reports.

Despite more diverse hires and an acknowledgement by the chief that racial bias in policing is a reality, carding itself increased over the years, and the disproportionate outcomes remained unchanged, Mukherjee said in his report.

“To the extent that carding is related to police stops, then, it has been considered by the Board and the Service for the last two decades as the source of a serious problem that had not been resolved by the strategies implemented in prior years,” wrote Mukherjee.

It is time to hold both the board and the service accountable, he said.

Racial profiling “as a form of discriminatory policing — even if by impact rather than intent — should not be seen as a problem of bad behaviour on the part of some individuals,” wrote Mukherjee. “It needs to be seen as the result of systemic practices involving policing strategies.”

John Sewell of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, who has reviewed Mukherjee’s recommendations, questions what constitutes a “bona fide” reason for a stop and whether many of the stops are necessary.

“Maybe we need to address directly the kind of information police need and how they gather it,” Sewell said in an email to the Star. “For instance, it may not be important to stop people to get the info they need.”

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Sewell also stressed the importance of letting citizens know by way of a receipt when they have been documented, the reason for the stop and what sort or personal detail was captured.

The police board has announced that it will hold a public meeting Nov. 18 at City Hall to get input before it writes a new carding policy.

The practice, which is also referred to as street checks, has been in the news since Star investigations in 2010 and 2012 showed blacks were more likely than whites to be carded by police in each of Toronto’s 70-plus police patrol zones. The likelihood increased in predominantly white areas.

After the 2012 Star series, the board passed a number of motions to make the force more accountable, but have struggled to implement change.

An update of the ongoing Star investigation, published by the Star in September, showed those ratios have not changed and that the number of young black males carded exceeded Toronto’s young black male population. Police officers filled out nearly 400,000 contact cards in 2012, an increase of 23 per cent from 2008.

The Star analysis also shows blacks in Toronto were stopped and documented to a higher degree than blacks who were stopped and frisked by New York City police under a policy there that has led to lawsuits and settlements.

Police have already created a joint police and community advisory committee to implement and evaluate the 31 recommendations they have brought forward. That committee held its first meeting at police headquarters in October, an event not open to the public.

Police defend carding, where an individual’s personal information is recorded on a card and later entered into a computer database, as a valuable intelligence gathering tool.

But the force began its own review in March 2012 in response to “growing concerns voiced by individuals, public groups, and organizations in the community, that some people were being unfairly targeted by the police,” police spokesperson Meaghan Gray wrote in a recent email.

The board’s public meeting takes place at 5 p.m. Nov. 18 in city council chambers. The meeting will be based on the police report as well as Mukherjee’s report on carding and racial profiling.

Speakers are limited to five minutes and must register in advance by emailing sheri.fulton@tpsb.ca or by calling 416-808-8089. Written submissions are also welcome.

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