Despite years of growing criticism, Toronto police continue to disproportionately stop, question and document blacks — and to a lesser extent, people with “brown” skin — adding their personal details into a controversial database.

Proportionally, a new Star analysis of Toronto police data from 2008 to 2012 shows blacks here 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 outrage, lawsuits and settlements.

Looking solely at young black male Toronto residents, aged 15 to 24, the Star found the number who were “carded” at least once between 2008 and 2012 — in the police patrol zone where they live — actually exceeds by a small margin the number of young black males, aged 15 to 24, who live in Toronto.

“Devastating” and “unacceptable” was how Alok Mukherjee, chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, described the lack of change in the Toronto contact card data and the comparison to the New York numbers.

“We’ve been saying … we are different,” said Mukherjee, who was presented with a summary of the Star findings. “We are world leaders. We get awards and recognition for all that we have done for diversity and human rights. And then you see that.

“There has been a focus on dealing with gun violence but it still raises the question about the justification of the legitimacy of potentially carding every single young black in the city,” said Mukherjee. He is expected to deliver a blunt report at the next police board meeting.

Toronto police have been busy trying to get out in front of the growing criticism over contact cards — forms filled out by officers in encounters that are typically non-criminal — and are set to reveal an overhaul of the way they police the city. Police are poised to share major proposed changes to the way officers conduct these stops and how data is kept.

Between 2008 and 2012, police filled out 1.8 million contact cards, involving more than a million individuals, in stops that typically result in no arrest or charge. The data end up in a massive police database that currently has no purging requirements.

Officers search the database routinely following crimes and during stops. Police have cited cases where contact cards helped close homicide cases, and investigators value a database that makes connections among people, locations and times.

Police Chief Bill Blair has acknowledged that encounters that involve stopping, questioning and documenting people who might simply be going about their business do not always go well but, done properly, he considers them good policing.

He has also readily said racial bias is a reality in society, and policing, and may account for some of the differences.

In a police conference call interview this week with the Star, which obtained the data in a freedom-of-information request, Blair was not available. But senior brass, including deputy chiefs Peter Sloly and Mark Saunders, defended carding as a valuable tool.

But they also strongly signalled that change is underway.

“We’re doing this 370,000 times (a year) on average,” said Saunders. “And out of the 370,000 times I’m going to suggest that we do it well. And the focus and direction, hopefully, is how do we do it better.”

A Star investigation delves into the widespread practice of "contact carding" - and its impact.

Police are expected to unveil 31 recommendations from an internal review of all operations, including carding, as early as Oct. 7, the police board’s next scheduled meeting.

Whatever police propose, Mukherjee — clearly frustrated by the lack of meaningful street-level changes since 2005, when he became chair and Blair became chief — said the board must hold police accountable.

“The chief may provide his explanation of this data but the numbers are what they are,” he said. “The board has given a lot of latitude, I mean eight years of latitude, we do policy, we do a human rights charter, we do training. All those pieces are in place.

“So what’s left? People holding people accountable to the expectations of bias-free, non-discriminatory policing with respect for human rights.”

Similar frustrations were expressed to varying degree by other stakeholders the Star shared its analysis with, including Barbara Hall, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, as well as academics, lawyers, youth, community workers and activists who have been attending police board meetings on the issue.

“The comparison between Toronto and New York is very graphic,” said Hall, a former Toronto mayor, and she echoed the concerns of Mukherjee.

“It says there’s something serious here that we need answers.”

Critics say the stopping and questioning of citizens, also known as “street checks,” has eroded trust of police in communities that are dealing with violence and may actually make some neighbourhoods less safe.

Knia Singh and Chris Williams filed requests with Toronto police to see their contact cards.

The new Star analysis shows:

In each of the city’s 70-plus patrol zones, blacks — and to a lesser extent people with “brown” skin — remained more likely than white people to be subjected to police stops that result in no arrest or charges being laid. The likelihood increases for blacks in areas of the city that are predominantly white.

The proportion of cards for black people in Toronto is three times greater than blacks’ share of Toronto’s population. In New York, the proportion of blacks stopped and frisked is 2.3 times greater than blacks’ share of that city’s population.

Carding is up, despite criticisms and questions of the legality of some stops. From 2008 to 2012, the number of street checks conducted rose 23 per cent. In 2012, police filled out 397,713 contact cards, involving 302,719 individuals. Since 2005, the year Toronto experienced the “year of the gun,” the number of cards has increased by 62 per cent.

More than half of the people documented between 2008 and 2012 lived in or near the patrol zone where they were stopped. That number increases in at-risk neighbourhoods, where incomes are lower and people less mobile.

With that in mind, from 2008 to 2012, the number of young black males, aged 15 to 24, who were documented at least once in the police patrol zone where they live exceeded the young black male population for all of Toronto.

It’s important to note that for each group, each year, a number of young people enter this demographic, as 14-year-olds become 15, and, if carded, they contribute to a higher count, and this would make it entirely possible that the number exceeds the snapshot census population estimates. But as police continue to stop, question and document hundreds of thousands of people annually, it becomes increasingly possible that all black, and to a lesser extent brown, youth in certain parts of the city could become part of the contact card database.

Blacks were charged with serious violent offences at a rate higher than their baseline population. This has remained the case for more than a decade.

Police this week said carding has dropped 25 per cent from January to June of this year, a sign, perhaps, that officers are thinking harder about when to document. There has also been another drop over the summer, since police began issuing “receipts” to those they card, Sloly said.

It’s not clear if the patterns of who police stop has changed as well.

Police say they are policing communities where violence occurs and act on intelligence in terms of who they target, and that this has contributed to declines in crime.

“The officers aren’t going in with the purpose of identifying everything that’s moving,” said deputy chief Saunders, responding to the portion of the Star analysis that suggests police may have, over a number of years, documented every young man of colour in certain neighbourhoods.

“They’re specific in who they’re going to speaking to,” said Saunders. “It’s intelligence-led. So you’re not ever going to have a unit commander say we need you to identify every single type of person. It is going to be based upon what criminal activities are happening in that neighbourhood.”

While certainly there is no suggestion of a police policy or direction to document an entire demographic, police conceded that, statistically, it’s “possible” that this has happened.

One of the many problematic aspects of police "carding" young men of colour, say critics, is the impact it has on young lives.

“It’s just not arbitrary mass rounding up of any particular group of people from a geographic location or demographic circumstance,” said Sloly. “Numerically you could probably get to that point in terms of total numbers.

“In reality it is impossible. Neighbourhood officers assigned to communities are simply not going about their business in that way.”

Toronto Police Association Mike McCormack criticized the Star’s use of census data comparisons, saying in a letter that the analysis is “flawed” and “distorted,” and that “any comparison should be with the actual street population.” That’s who police “interact with and it is dramatically different from the census population.”

The census was the only available benchmark, and the Star has used this analysis on four separate occasions, dating back to 2002.

What police, repeatedly, have shied away from addressing head on are the Star findings that in each of the city’s patrol zones black people are more likely to be stopped and documented than whites, and that those likelihoods increase in more affluent, predominantly white areas.

The Star findings that blacks are treated differently are consistent with numerous academic studies and reports, including the 1995 Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System, which looked at policing, the courts and the correctional system.

The studies don’t suggest overt racism is a main reason for the differences, though it may account for some of it. Implicit bias, where people act on biases they are unaware of, learned behaviour and the way systems are set up are other factors.

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Regardless, the differences are there in study after study.

"Contact carding," argue some, reflects a deeply entrenched "institutional" mindset at Toronto Police Service.

Toronto police have dismissed comparisons of carding to New York, but critics say what’s been going in Toronto — stops that sometimes involve patdowns and searches of bags, and can seem arbitrary — is an unofficial version of “stop-and-frisk.”

“It’s a different legal system, with a different legal tradition, in a different country. We do not engage in ‘stop and frisk,’ ” Toronto police spokesperson Mark Pugash told the Star in August, following a U.S. court ruling that found the New York police program to be unconstitutional and an indirect form of racial profiling.

“Stop-and-frisk” is primarily about getting guns off the street. Contact cards are used to make connections. But many say the net results of the two programs are the same.

“Carding is effectively the same thing as ‘stopping and frisking’ because the facts found in the case law and the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority of people who are carded also get searched to some degree,” said Toronto criminal defence lawyer Reid Rusonik, who has cross-examined dozens of police witnesses in various cases about carding.

Facing legal pressure, New York police recently volunteered to begin purging personal details from “stop-and-frisks” that involved no arrest or charge — the vast majority.

In Toronto, one in 10 people carded between 2008 and 2012 was arrested and charged by Toronto police during that same time period.

Toronto police capture personal details in these stops. They document the location and reason for contact, such as “general investigation” and “traffic stop,” and the names and personal details of others involved in the stop, including car passengers and pedestrians.

The practice is nothing new and many other police services have similar procedures. Police use the database to search for personal connections and possible witnesses and suspects following crimes and say it is an invaluable investigative tool.

Contact cards also count in performance reviews and supervisors expect their officers to conduct a certain level of checks each shift. Police insist there are no official quotas.

In Part 2 of this series, the Star examines the contact cards of individual officers in search of patterns and potential problems.

The quality of cards varies. While some are completely filled out, others are missing information, such as skin colour.

Knia Singh, a youth mentor, law student and community organizer, and his friend Chris Williams, an academic and community activist, have never been arrested or charged with a crime but, aware of the practice of carding, filed a freedom-of-information request for their contact cards. Both are black.

Critics argue that contact carding is harmful when based on assumptions and misplaced suspicion.

Singh received a dossier of more than 50 pages of data police have compiled on him, some of it stemming from traffic violations. Amongst the pages are data from eight contact cards, indicating that his personal details and officer observations — like rudeness to police or Knia’s suggestion he’d been racially profiled — have become part of the massive police database.

Singh, 39, who is the current chair of the Caribana Arts Group, says he was surprised by how many times he’d been documented, and by the dismal quality of the information.

The contact cards list him as ranging from five-foot-nine to a lofty eight feet. One card listed him as being born in Jamaica. (He was born in Toronto.) Another describes his appearance as “Caribbean.”

“There’s varying information in this and it concerns me,” said Singh, who shared his stop information with the Star. “First of all, I don’t know why I’m being documented in this way. And second of all, things are inaccurate.”

“I’ve never been arrested but yet I have a file this thick in a Toronto police database on me,” he said. “It’s an insult and it’s dangerous.”

Williams, also 39, got back a single hit from the contact card database, stemming from a police stop he recalls quite well. . In April 2010, police from the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) unit boxed in his parked car after following him in a Toronto Community Housing property.

The police, said Williams, contended the reason for the interaction was an expired tag on his licence plate and argued that because it was after 5 p.m. on his birthday, he should have had the new tag in place.

Williams disagreed and no ticket was issued. But then came the questions, including a request for his phone number.

“I just want to get some of your information in case we need to do some sort of follow-up,” Williams recalled one of the officers asking. They wanted all of his personal details, and made a physical description, noting he was “clean shaven.” Looking at the data now, he said it feels like a description of a suspect.

He co-operated and is now part of the internal database.

Knia Singh and Chris Williams, on what Toronto police should hear about contact carding.

Williams and Singh share feelings that carding creates a list of names and circumstances that can stigmatize blacks, regardless of where they live, but more so for young people living in at-risk neighbourhoods.

John Sewell, another former Toronto mayor and head of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, found the Star analysis of carding “discouraging.”

“Here’s been all this criticism, and they’re doing more of it.”

The Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy, a provincially funded program implemented by Blair following a spate of gun violence in 2005, involves targeted policing in crime hotspots. TAVIS officers have more contacts with the public, and spend more time in at-risk neighbourhoods. The unit has the highest black carding rate of any police unit.

Although TAVIS officers have more contacts with citizens, every patrol officer in every division in the city is expected to conduct “street checks” as part of their daily duties. Done in the right way and in the right circumstance, it’s considered good policing.

Police have instituted a carding receipt program at the insistence of the police board and other watchdog groups, so that those people carded at least know they have been documented.

But, like board chair Mukherjee, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association questioned whether there has been a meaningful police response to the carding issue. The receipts, says, Mendelsohn Aviv, are not a useful accountability tool.

“Have they done something? Yes. Is it a meaningful and helpful response? Not nearly enough.”

Through a youth legal rights program run by the CCLA, Mendelson-Aviv said the group has heard from youth about their interactions with police. “What’s being created is distrust, alienation, and really the opposite of the goals of community policing.”

Police say they are aware of problems. The police board and other groups will be closely watching for what comes, but they also want answers and accountability for what has happened.

“I don’t think that with this track record the board can just take something on faith and trust,” said Mukherjee.

RELATED LINKS:

Advanced Star analysis package

Unacceptable pattern: Toronto Police Services Board chair Alok Mukherjee’s blunt note-form response to a Toronto Star analysis of police contacts with citizens.

Tale of two cities: An analysis by the African Canadian Legal Clinic of similarities and differences between New York’s stop and frisk policy and Toronto police stopping and documenting of citizens.