It has been over two years since the Ontario government introduced the first regulation in Canada aimed at monitoring and restricting the controversial police practice of “carding,” where officers randomly stop individuals, collect their identifying information, and store it in a database for intelligence purposes.

Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Michael Tulloch was appointed to review this practice in 2017-18 and found that while “street checks” can be a useful tool for investigations, they too often developed into an unfocused practice of “carding” disproportionately applied to Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities.

The regulation does not ban street checks, but instead adds a framework to the Police Services Act to better govern their use by limiting the information that can be collected as well as by requiring the police to inform stopped citizen of their rights.

The regulation also requires police officers in certain circumstances (which Tulloch found in need of additional clarification) to record information about the individuals they approach so the overall collections can be examined to detect any systemic bias.

To ensure compliance, police chiefs are required to submit an annual report that presents 13 metrics, including the total number of attempted collections made; the racial, gender, and age breakdown of the individuals from whom information was collected; and information on officers’ implementation of the provisions. Tulloch recommended these reports be made publicly available within six months of the following calendar year to allow for civilian oversight of street checks.

We decided to followup on the challenge of “civilian oversight” by looking for these reports in July — two-and-a-half years after the regulation was put in force.

We found that more than half of Ontario’s 47 police forces have not published a 2017 or 2018 report with carding data. We specifically identified 24 forces across the province who have not made available their annual reports for either year. Of the remaining 23, only 15 have reported both years as required by the regulation. And for this minority of forces who have published both reports, they greatly vary in level of detail and quality.

Almost of all of Ontario’s larger services (500 officers or greater) have published reports for both years — with the Ontario Provincial Police releasing particularly comprehensive, easy to locate reports for both years that meet all of the law’s requirements — unfortunately this was largely the exception.

Other reports contain a single sentence on the number of collections and sometimes placed it either in the middle of more general data about police operations or buried in the minutes of police board meetings, making the data more obscure and less available to public scrutiny.

A substantial number of reports provide only selective data and many reports lacked detailed racial and age categories, which hampers the ability to identify potential biases in collections. Some reports simply indicate that all of their collections were from people “over the age of 18,” which limits oversight on any disproportionate collection being made on younger adults.

Overall, these reports vary in not only their level of detail, but in the manner in which they are measuring and recording their street checks. Such inconsistencies in reporting make it difficult to make comparisons across police services. To be fair, ensuring consistency of reporting is beyond the power of any particular police force and, instead, falls to the provincial government, where the necessary support and guidance has not been forthcoming.

From the reports we were able to locate, we found that police forces on the whole are reporting a dramatic decline of almost 75 per cent over the two years the regulation has been in force. In 2017, police in Ontario reported 359 collections cumulatively as compared to 91 collections in 2018.

This could mean the regulation is working well to curb the practice of carding, with police conducting and recording “street checks” judiciously to investigate and prevent crime. However, given the inconsistencies in reporting, we are left uncertain.

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Some police have argued that the regulation has contributed to “depolicing.” Conversely, some critics have argued that the police are drastically underreporting “carding” and generously interpreting the exceptions where no recording of an encounter is required, such as for traffic stops, arrest or detention, or investigating a specific crime.

Until these reports are published in a consistent, accessible, and comprehensive manner, it will be difficult to untangle what the numbers say about the practice of carding or street checks in Ontario and civilian oversight of policing will continue to be frustrated.