Days after Nova Scotia’s justice minister said a moratorium on street checks in the province will become permanent, Halifax’s police force says it’s preparing a sweeping apology for decades of unfair treatment towards African Nova Scotians.
The exact wording is still being developed in consultation with the community, but police Chief Dan Kinsella said it will go beyond street checks — the act of stopping an individual and collecting and recording their personal information.
Street checks have historically been disproportionately applied toward people of colour, with black people being six times more likely to be stopped than white people.
“I think we all know that street checks are part of the larger issue,” said Kinsella at a Halifax Board of Police Commissioners meeting on Monday.
“The more broad issue here is some 200 years of inequality and injustice that have occurred, and the apology will be all-encompassing.”
A recent independent legal assessment prepared for the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission found street checks to be illegal in Nova Scotia due to the way they’ve been carried out in the province, unreasonably infringing on individual rights.
Released publicly on Friday, it said: “Street checks are not reasonably necessary for the police to execute their duties, when balanced against the interference with individual liberty, and the disproportionate effects on Black Nova Scotians, that street checks entail.”
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“Police have wide-reaching powers — they have to to do their job — but in the execution of those powers, they still have to maintain law,” explained Kymberly Franklin, the commission’s senior legal counsel.
Kinsella said education and training initiatives are already underway within the force to stop street checks and eliminate bias. Officers who fail to comply with the permanent ban on street checks could eventually face disciplinary action, he added.
“If those incidents are occurring, then I need to know,” he told reporters. “I will certainly look into it, I will investigate and I will hold members accountable in the instances where they’re not abiding by the requirement policies and the law.”
READ MORE: Activists ‘relieved’ by N.S. decision to make moratorium on street checks permanent
The upcoming ban has been well received by members of the African Nova Scotian community, although some question how effective it will be. Trayvone Clayton, who has been street-checked multiple times, said he wouldn’t feel comfortable asserting his right not to be street-checked if an officer confronted him for fear of repercussions.
“Street checks are banned, OK, but police can still act the way they want to act just because they have a badge and a gun,” he said.
Kate MacDonald, an African Nova Scotian community activist, recognized that much more work needs to be done to put a ban — and a change in officer thinking — into place in the province. But she congratulated all of the advocates and organizations whose hard work contributed to the ban being announced and said she looks forward to a new chapter of relations with police.
“I think that it starts now so we have policies and frameworks to start taking those steps to change that behaviour, and then we work on the interpersonal and trust-building piece,” MacDonald said after the meeting.
“It’s taken this long to have police relations look like this, and it’s going to take at least this long again to change them.”
Although Kinsella said an apology is forthcoming, Chief Supt. Janis Gray of the Halifax District RCMP would not commit to a response from the Mounties.
Gray said discussions of a possible apology are underway but that no outcome had been decided. She also said any apology would be decided by someone higher up the chain of command.
The independent legal opinion published on Friday was commissioned in response to a 180-page report written by Scot Wortley, a professor of criminology at the University of Toronto.
The Wortley report was published in March and detailed how African Nova Scotians were five times more likely to be stopped and street-checked by police than the general population.
His report analyzed 12 years of data from both the Halifax Regional Police and the RCMP, which patrols certain parts of the Halifax Regional Municipality. The report found that between 2006 and 2017, black people were disproportionately questioned by police.
Wortley concluded that street checks had a “disproportionate and negative” impact on the African Nova Scotia community.
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