So what’s so commendable about carding?

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                   by Kenneth Bagnell

 

      

 

       It’s now about half a century since, as a member of the Toronto Star’s editorial board – consisting of four or five editorial writers – we listened to the ceaseless complaints of the visiting Toronto police over lunch. They were quite aggressive: Why did you write that? Why did you say this? why don’t you do this or that instead? They didn’t even seem to recognize the right to the long historic democratic privilege of democratic free speech. The then chief – Jim MacKay a former milkman in Lindsay – at times let his face go beet red with anger; I honestly worried for him. (I don’t denigrate milkmen but we’ve long needed police chiefs schooled in criminology.) They were stressful meetings and I kept quiet letting the head of the board, then a man named Mark Harrison, a long experienced foreign correspondent,  carry the ball. (The board members were well educated and highly experienced, including the respected Robert Nielson and the recently deceased Val Sears, and then me — the very junior fresh from The United Church Observer. Now and then a man of the police’s own Police Services Board would lean over and whisper to me, the junior member: “If you guys keep this up, a lot of officers are going to quit.” What rot. The pay, the extras, the security are far too good.

      There are just some aspects that accompany police work that they, including their Chief, just did not even understand. Bring up civil liberties and it would all but set their hair on fire. It went on for year and years. You want proof?  Alright take “carding.”   Maybe where you live you have reason to know nothing at all about it. Moreover to me it’s simply amazing that a city with a well-educated populace permitted the Toronto police to get away with it in the first place. Imagine this in Halifax or Victoria. Here’s what happened over several years beginning in 2008:

    An officer casually meets you while you are on the way to work. He stops you. He asks a fairly large package of questions; he scribbles the information in his notebook: your background, your work, maybe your “associates” and maybe your residence. You could be a school teacher, a dentist, a psychiatrist, even a courtroom lawyer. But in almost all cases there’s one characteristic that’s always common: you’re black. I’m amazed it was accepted and practiced as long as it was. (About a million people were “carded.”) To Toronto’s credit, its citizens raised sufficient indignation, that carding is now pretty well off the police agenda. A good thing.

      Have we learned anything worthwhile from this intrusive and presumptuous experiment.   I doubt it. The police mentality remains the police mentality. But the good news is this: if, you are out for a stroll, and have no reason to be questioned, you can tell the cop to, well, take a walk. Nonetheless the tens of thousands of names of young black men carded in the past are in all probability still retained. They’re on the record. Not right. For example, what happened a year ago or more can happen again: A Toronto street constable arrested a youth named Mutaz Elmardy and detained him. He complained that there was no reason for his arrest. He was an innocent citizen so why this? The constable punched him in the head. Twice. Isn’t that great?  Well, in May the court awarded the innocent man $27,000 in punitive damage. But don’t let that ease your indignation.

     The Globe & Mail commenting on this incident back in May 2015, was clearly right when its editorialists wrote: “The ruling was part of a general change toward police. The benefit of the doubt that courts and civilian bodies once gave the police has been eroded by all the citizen videos available on line that show officers needlessly escalating routine contacts into violent confrontations. It’s not just a U.S problem. There is a smorgasbord of videos of Canadian police officers slamming suspects’ heads into the hoods of police cruisers, kicking docile suspects in the head, and punching suspects in the face..” Even I am shocked by that. But it got worse:

   “There is also a surveillance video from 2011 of Toronto police officers carding four innocent black teenagers and punching and arresting one of them for refusing to co-operate, as was his right. The police subsequently and spuriously charged all four of the teens with assaulting police while the one who spoke out was also charged with resisting arrest and uttering a death threat. All charges were later dropped.” So what are we to make of that?  It’s been a rugged road to the era of Mayor John Tory who in the early days of 2015, when the new and seasoned Tory told Police Chief Bill Blair, (now a member of Parliament) to order his constabulary, to cease the practice of carding. And yet the overall practice still muddled on and not just in Toronto; despite the fact that, whether in Toronto or Hamilton, criminologists and journalists recognize and report that it’s provably prejudiced against black citizens.

     The good and expert citizens on these matters, members of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, are strongly against carding. They have researched the statistics on carding and have made public their support of discarding carding: “Despite the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s request for date to support claims that carding is effective, we have received nothing that shows that carding solves or prevents crime, or even reduces violence. In fact, research from the United States and Britain shows the exact opposite — 99 percent of the time, carding yields no evidence of criminal activity. What we also know is that homicides in Toronto have declined by approximately 35 percent since 2009, and that gun violence is also declining, all this while Toronto police have been placing less and less reliance on carding as part of their intelligence gathering activities.” That’s good news. We are better off without the presumptuous and dreadfully arrogant practice known as carding. 

 

 

     All of Kenneth Bagnell’s blogs and other essays are archived on his website www.kennethbagnell.com.