John Tory to call for full stop to carding, citing ‘eroded public trust’
Toronto’s mayor tells the Star he will call for a moratorium on carding next week until more transparent rules for how police deal with the public.
Mayor John Tory is calling for a further moratorium on carding after a realization that the recent “incremental†reforms made by the police board to the controversial practice didn’t go far enough to resolve the “toxic†impact that carding has created within communities.
“I will now say that while I thought that the new policy was a step forward in terms of where were really were, which was with this policy in place but no procedure — I think in terms of the reaction that’s taken place in the community at large, people didn’t see it that way,†said Tory in an interview with the Star in his office at City Hall on Sunday.
Tory is expected to say later today in a speech that “the best investigative tool the police have is the trust of the people they serve and protect†and further that carding has “eroded public trust to a level that is clearly unacceptable.â€
But while the mayor will bring a motion to halt the practice at the June 18 meeting of the board, it doesn’t mean that carding will be abolished.
Tory wants to start with a “clean slate†and create a policy that addresses purging the database, advising citizens proactively that the interaction is voluntary, providing some type of receipt and to eliminating random stops, which are responsible for filling a police database with the names and information of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
“We have to go right back to the beginning,†said Tory, who said the board needed a “fresh†start to develop “something that is going to work and that is going to have the confidence of the public.â€
Any new policy will still have to be put into effect by Chief Mark Saunders, who has defended carding and denounced the Star’s statistical investigations into the practice in an internal report.
Carding was suspended by former police chief Bill Blair in January, but Saunders is working to finalize procedures that may or may not include many of the elements sought by Tory.
In an email earlier this month, Toronto Police spokesperson Meaghan Gray said “Chief Saunders will finalize the procedure once he has completed his consultations with internal and external stakeholders.
“While these consultations are important, it is his procedure to finalize and, like all other procedures, it does not require approval from anyone else.â€
The mayor also believes the three opinions on the legality of carding, which former Chief Bill Blair solicited and paid for with taxpayers money, should be made public. Although other board members have seen them, after they signed confidentiality agreements, the mayor has not.
The decision by Tory came at the end of a tough week where a group of his peers, former mayors, politicians and activists, including his campaign co-chair Bob Richardson, took the mayor by surprise with a plan to publicly issue a statement — just steps from his office door — that called for a halt to the “corrosive†practice.
Tory found out about the petition only a day before and asked three of the concerned citizens group to meet with him.
That was followed by an opinion piece published in the Toronto Star by police board chair Alok Mukherjee who stated that documenting innocent civilians was wrong and should end.
The turning point for Tory came at the end of the same hectic week, when he was leaving Edmonton after attending the annual Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference in Edmonton.
There, Tory got advice from other big city mayors — including Edmonton’s Don Iveson, Calgary’s Naheed Nenshi, Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson and Ottawa’s Jim Watson — on how to move forward. Tory said the take-away was to follow his conscience.
In the cab ride to Edmonton’s airport en route to a business meeting in San Francisco, Tory turned to chief of staff Chris Eby and told him about his change of heart.
The two wrote the first draft of the speech the mayor is delivering at 2 p.m. Sunday.
A number of Star investigations have shown that the police practice of carding — stopping and documenting citizens in mostly non-criminal encounters — has disproportionately impacted people who are black, and to a lesser extent people with brown skin.
The Toronto police services board has been working to reform the process since 2012.
In July 2013, when the board brought in a motion that officers issue receipts, carding in Toronto dropped by 75 per cent compared to that time a year earlier, and stayed low in the following months.
But a Star investigation showed that after the drop in carding, the proportion of contact cards for people with black skin rose to 27.4 per cent. That is 3.4 times the proportion of Toronto’s black population, which stands at 8.1 per cent, according to the latest census figures.
The board voted in a progressive carding policy in April 2014, one that called for many of the same reforms that Tory now says should be part of any policy going forward and would have made it a leader in policing in North America. That policy was stonewalled by former chief Blair, who refused to write procedures to enact it, and chose to suspend the practice in January rather than make a February deadline set by the board.
Tory brought in a mediator — former justice Warren Winkler to mediate — to resolve the impasse, but Blair wouldn’t budge on many of the key points.
The result was a watered-down version of the policy voted in by the board in April this year, without many of the rights provisions that dozens of activists fought for and which were written into the earlier policy.
Although it did say police should inform citizens of their rights if asked, and that they were to issue a business-card receipt, the narrow restrictions of when police could card — basically only when they were investigating a crime — had been lost.
That capitulation by the board, along with a devastating account by Desmond Cole about his interactions with police in Toronto Life, was a turning point for the city.
Tory said candidly Sunday that he mistakenly thought that policy would be a “step forward.â€
“We had an agreement between the police board and the chief with respect to a procedure that did take some steps forward,†said the mayor, noting that it was the first time that procedures had been written by the chief.
The mayor thought the reaction would be more positive and a step toward continuous reform.
“And it turns out that the level of dissatisfaction from those who in particular had felt the corrosive effects of carding — but I think even on a broader basis there was not a general level of satisfaction in the community that sort of said, you know what, we’re on the right path here, let’s give this time — I don’t believe that tht was happening. I think if anything it was going the other way.â€
