On Monday June 16 WSIC brought to the stage the topic of police carding. We were fortunate to host three guest speakers to lead the discussion – Kwesi Marcel Opoku from the Police Literary Initiative, professor Wilburn Hayden of York University, and defence lawyer and Toronto mayoral candidate Ari Goldkind. Each brought different perspectives, yet all agreed that the policy of carding was detrimental to our community.
Kwesi Marcel Opoku began the evening with a personal anecdote about how his home was raided by police with little requirement for suspicion. Young black men are 3 times more likely to be carded than their white counterparts.
Wilburn Hayden opened with his own background of being born and raised in segregation in the Southern US. Compared to this overt racism, he wanted to point out how Canada prides itself on being a “colour blind” society, but that this does not play out for blacks and other highly visible and stereotyped minorities. He thus pointed out that carding and the racial profiling that it represents are merely symptoms of racism which is at the root of these issues.
Ari Goldkind gave an eloquent defence of the practice as a devil’s advocate since police must optimize their time. However, he points out that no studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of the practice.
What exactly is carding? This was for many, the biggest surprise of the night. This was a policy used by the Toronto police to go up to a group of people and ask for their identification. In and of itself, this didn’t seem like an issue until Goldkind explained the far reaching consequences of being “known to police”. Without trial, guilt, or even suspicion, these young people who are carded are forever entered into a database. Should one of these young man ever decide he wants to be a teacher or nurse in the future, that fateful day of just playing basketball with his buddies can then identify him as “known to police” which can lead to a failed background check.
Carding destroys the trust between citizens and police by creating negative real life implications for those carded without any legal basis for the police. While technically it is legal for a citizen to walk away from a police officer when being asked, the power dynamic is such that it is very hard. A trained lawyer in the room, knowing his full legal rights, found it difficult to walk away when being carded by police. (It involved challenging the police to either arrest him or allow him to walk away, and being combative with a police offer can often get you arrested!)
Historically in Canada (and North America) demographics of violent crimes has been used to justify the policy of carding; carding has been effectively stopped in Toronto and we have not seen any increase in violent crime. The issue remains however for the database that is still in existence ready to haunt young people as they prepare for the job market.
With racism and its impacts at the heart of the issue, perception is as important as fact because the police represent our society. Public institutions should be held to a higher standard in that they should not only actively discourage potentially racist policies, they should actively discourage policies that create an atmosphere of racism. The safety of our community is entrusted to the police and a large part of that is perception – if people feel safe, they are safe.
People need jobs, but those can be impacted by having one’s name in a police database, even if that person has done nothing wrong. There has been movement toward erasing all data in the database prior to July 2013, however, the police can keep any information if they feel it is in the public’s safety interest creating a giant loophole that vulnerable people can fall into. Kids from vulnerable communities do not deserve to have their careers potentially ruined before they start simply for being kids.
What can be done? One simple idea is to use technology to help document interaction with police officers. Lapel cameras are a cheap way for the police to show the public how they are doing their job and build up the trust between their corps and our communities which they serve. At $700 a piece, lapel cameras are a bargain compared to court time for police, lawyers, and judges. Goldkind pointed out that good police officers (of which there are many), generally support the idea of lapel cameras. It helps them weed out their own bad apples. In addition, the public needs to get behind the idea of destroying the existing police database. Kids carded simply for being kids should not have this record for life. It impacts their futures and will affect their ability to break the cycle.
Ari GoldKind’s Opening Remarks:
Transcript:
Okay so my name is Ari Goldkind and thank you for the introduction and thank you for having me. I’m a criminal defense lawyer in Toronto. As many of you know may also know I’m also running for mayor.
So I’m here tonight with two hats on. I have my criminal lawyer hat on which is my day job in my full life for the last ten years but I’m also running for mayor and one of my big interest is in policing issues and more specifically the police budget. Tonight is about carding so what I’m going to talk about is in my view is I want to answer questions. My whole thing is whatever you want to ask me I’ll answers. Some of the answers maybe popular some maybe not but this issue is the mine field of carding. So let me start before I go into a few remarks how many you in the room are conceptually against the practice of carding. Show your hands. And I’m going to guess when I say how many of you support the practice of carding? I may be lucky to see one hand. Anybody willing to put their hand up? I see one hand. So the issue of carding is a very complex one but given what I do for a living it is actually an extremely simple one. Carding and many of you will understand carding in a much more first-hand way than I will.
I defended. I deal with the report after the damage is done. Carding comes down to a simple issue as I see it. Trust. And the question is does the practice of carding and I’m assuming everybody knows what carding is. Yes? Does anybody not know what it is? So long story short, what carding is is not the example you gave about the cops busting through the door and putting everybody on the ground. That is a very different fish that I won’t get into unless somebody ask me about it. Carding is to use the easiest example two or three or four young black men are walking down the street. That’s all they’re doing. Or they’re playing basketball. They’re on the basketball court and I mean that literally this is not some weird example and what they’re doing is absolutely not connected to any crime. You must understand this. They’re not suspected of committing any crime and they’re not part of any police investigations. Now the reason I say that to answer your question is if that wasn’t the case the police have a very different right to go up to those young men but there is no “right” in law to go up to any citizen on the street and essentially bug them. The Toronto police and this is now where the mine field is and I’m going to put it out in the room because if you don’t talk about it honestly the issue can’t be debated, which is, and I’m sure many you know this because Jim Raking***** (3:41) of The Star did a series on this. Show hands. Anybody? Okay, so you may all know, so don’t shoot the messenger that 30 percent of violent crimes, and you can finish this sentence so that I don’t take the heat, and this is important. 30 percent to violent crimes are committed according to the statistics which are accepted to be true by black men. So the police’s view is that even though the black percentage, population-wise in Toronto is 8 percent, the police, you have to be fair to their example not that I buy it, is that they have to focus on where the crime is. So to finish the answer what carding is, they go up to these young three men, they keep a database, they fill out a card of who these men are hanging with, who you’re talking to, what they’re doing, what they’re wearing, their skin color. It goes into a database and they’re called associates so if there was a crime committed the police have access to this sort of “Minority Report” database that lets them know about certain segments of the population. Now do they do this in Forest Hill and Rosedale? Absolutely not. The point to carding is they say that they’re trying to build intelligence. However, and this is the interesting part of it, there is no study that’s ever been done that show this actually does anything to solve crimes. There may be one-off examples here and there, but what it does is it erodes the trust of an entire community in the city and the question becomes is the price that is paid for this lack of trust, this breakdown in trust, for you have police officers, intimidating, now that’s the right word because as this conversation goes and I’m sure I’m close to five minutes. My view of carding is sort of nuanced because I see both ends, the investigation crimes but ruining the reputation of the police service, in my view, doesn’t always serve and protect. That statement has to mean something and the fundamental problem of carding and you actually touched on this so you’ve said something out loud and I think puts an end to the fallacy of this practice, which is, the police will tell you, and when I say you I don’t mean me, I don’t mean to you, I don’t mean you, but there are people in this room that gets stopped all the time and the police will tell you that those people have a choice to not talk to the cops, that they can say to the cops, I don’t want to talk to you, I want nothing to do with you, which in law, which many of you may know, there’s no obligation to answer the questions but as you’ve seen from a whole series of YouTube videos which are very interesting, it never works out in practice the way it is in theory so these young men, and they’re always young men of colour, let’s not pretend otherwise, are not given any choice to walk away and that is where the rubber meets the road on this for me because of the lack of choice to answer these questions, you can’t say to the cops, go away, because there’s going to be a price to pay but two, now I’m switching to my political hat, without lapel cameras on, which is the most important thing that could happen in Toronto policing ever, you always have the word, more often than not, of a white police officer against the word a young black man who said, look, I didn’t have a chance to go and meanwhile the situation gets out of hand and some violence may ensue in the trust is eroded. So this is an issue that is a mine field and I’m hoping with this introduction of what the stakes are, given the real numbers, what’s the balance and I look forward to answer any questions you will have and I’ll stop there.
Wilburn Hayden’s Opening Remarks
Transcript:
I’m going to take a different turn from the other two speakers and move towards looking at carding as just a symptom of a larger issue. The larger issue to me is racial profiling. But there’s an even larger issue than racial profiling in the GTA, in Canada, in North America. It is racism. So when I deal with the numbers around carding and the notion that we’ve been singled out because we’re black I have to come back to the question of why that is so? The issue for me is that we live in a racist society in which black people are treated very differently. As some of you may have already picked up I’m from the States originally. I have a Canadian citizenship. I’m just about as Canadian as anybody else in this room.
But I know what racism is. I’ll be 65 in September I grew up in segregation so I don’t have any illusion about what racism is and how it played out. One distinct difference I find in this society is that race is ignored but yet it is a fact. Many Canadian pride themselves on their colour-blind society. Well, it works if you’re white but most black folks I know including myself it don’t work. And let me give an example and it just happened in the past two weeks. And as Terri mentioned I’m a full professor at York University. They can’t get rid of me. I’m at the top of the heap. I’m ready to go on sabbatical. My son, who’s 17 now came back to Canada, he was born in Guelph. He can’t wait to get back to the US because of the nature of racism here. So we going to sell our house here, we have a house in Pittsburgh and come back into the market because he going to stay in the States. We’re getting our house ready for the market. The realtor suggests a cleaning service. His has been used many times. I called him the guy said he is going to come to my house around seven. He called me to confirm that he’s coming. Well, I realized I had a cross on a date and on a time so I couldn’t be there. He didn’t give me his number. So I had to leave. So he called me at seven to say I didn’t answer. But still he came and left. He called and gave me another miss on the phone and said there’s nobody there. Well, my son was there. So I called him back the next day. The head of the company said we came there and there’s a problem. The problem was I wasn’t here and I couldn’t contact him. So they had him call me back again. So I called and talked to the guy and the guy said I’ll come this evening at seven. I stayed home, my wife stayed home. Guess what? He didn’t show up. So we’ve gone out on a Saturday at 4 o’clock to an anniversary celebration and I noticed this card on my door from this company. And I stood there and said to myself. We were home all day. How come the card’s from the company? So I talked to the guy and asked him about it and he said he came by and said no one was home. And I asked him someone was home and he said I saw your son come out to empty the trash. He saw my son. He never came to my door after seeing my son so that means nobody was there. That’s racism and it happened to a full professor at York University. The only thing he knew about me was I had a black son and guess what, he’s not doing my house. Not because I didn’t want him. But he made a choice on race not to clean a black person’s house. That’s in the GTA and that’s just in the past week. So in regards to racism, it is real in the city.
It happens to most of us of colour every day. I think I will stop there and I’m ready for questions.