“We have heard from the community that street checks, by definition, are arbitrary as well as discriminatory and therefore can not be regulated; they must simply be ended”.
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Yasir Naqvi, minister of community safety and correctional services, will make an announcement Wednesday regarding carding regulations, the Star has learned.
Naqvi says he is not trying to prevent police from doing their jobs, but he insists that civil rights must come first.
It will also support the province’s police officers by providing them with clear and consistent rules to keep our communities safe. “Whether you are a brown man in Brampton and or an aboriginal woman in Thunder Bay or a young black male in Toronto, we heard you and we heard your lived reality and we are taking action today”.
If the regulation is passed, police would have to inform citizens of the reason they are being stopped, and tell them they don’t have to engage in conversation with the officers.
Individuals have always had the right to walk away from a street check, but changes to the Police Services Act will force officers to inform them of that right, said Naqvi. They will also be required to provide a reason for the stop, documentation about it afterwards, and must inform citizens how to file a complaint or access information obtained during the stop.
In a release, the Toronto Police Services Board said it “welcomed” the draft legislation. The Board has recognized that there have been significant and long-standing concerns with the nature of contacts between police officers and members of the community, in particular, people from racialized backgrounds, and with the retention of information derived from these contacts in the police database. “You’re basically assuming that there’s a few suspicious behaviour, and that’s how I think it’s going to be received by the person”, he said.
Toronto police spokesperson Mark Pugash responded to Naqvi’s comments last week by saying: “Nothing that the minister has said clashes with what Chief (Mark) Saunders has said”.
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Naqvi wouldn’t say what would happen to the personal information of Ontario residents’ already gathered through carding that is now in police databases.
