WATCH ABOVE: Police Board retains carding, reverting back to last year’s policy
TORONTO – The Toronto Police Services Board has voted unanimously to rescind the latest carding policy in favour of returning to a previous one until the province introduces regulations in the fall.
Carding, a controversial practice that involves police officers stopping and recording a person’s information to be stored in a database, has been on hold since January.
Mayor John Tory at first supported the practice, then vowed two weeks ago to abolish it completely and now is amending the practice.
“I believe today will represent a definitive end to carding … which is the arbitrary stopping of people for reasons unrelated to any criminal or law investigation and the recording of that information from those people and the storage of that information in a database about innocent people over a long-term basis,” Tory said.
“I think the 2014 policy, having listened to all of the people that came in front of us again today, will accomplish that in the interim period while we await what the provincial government is going to do in terms of standardized regulations they say they’re going to bring forward this fall.”
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Tory added that he thought it was prudent to have a policy in place that stops carding on an “interim basis” and that addresses many of the concerns of the community, in order to revise that policy later when the province comes forward with its recommendations.
The changes the board has approved include officers issuing receipts to those they stop and whose information they record and advising community members they have no legal obligation to stop and talk to police.
“I think it’s a good step forward, I wouldn’t go so far as the mayor apparently has in saying this is now the end of carding – we’re just back to where we were in April of 2014. And it’s a really good first step, but there are some flaws in that 2014 policy that need to be addressed,” said Howard Morton, a member of the Law Union of Ontario.
“It doesn’t mean that officers are still not approaching people who ware minding their own business solely for the purpose of collecting identification or personal information and we have evidence that that is still going on and my fear is it’s going to go on tomorrow as well.”
Chief Mark Saunders agreed to implement the policy in the interim, but said he would also wait to see what the province wants to do over the long term.
“It’s a very positive change from where we were a few months ago, we’re going back to where we were just over a year ago but we’re happy to be back there just as a first step,” said Noa Mendelson Aviv, director of the equality program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
“Police are required to give written information in the form of a receipt to individuals that they’ve stopped, which they can then turn around and use if they want to complain. They can actually know certain key information about the interaction and there are other accountability measures as well which are really important.”
Ontario’s Liberal government has said it will regulate but not ban police street checks and will hold consultations over the summer before standardizing the practice province-wide.
*With files from Mark McAllister and The Canadian Press
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