Rohan Robinson begins the mental countdown. A police cruiser has pulled up beside his Acura, an officer has peeked in the driver’s side window, and the cruiser has dropped back in behind his car...
Usually, he sees the flashing lights in the rear-view mirror before he reaches zero. “It’s so routine now that I know,” says Robinson, 32, an elementary school teacher with the Toronto District School Board.
Robinson, who is black, estimates that since 2001, he has been stopped close to 30 times while driving in Toronto without being ticketed. On a few other occasions he was handed tickets, and he says he deserved them.
Before he was old enough to drive, beginning when he was 15, he would be stopped while on foot.
Toronto police question hundreds of thousands of people, both walking and driving, every year. In many cases, officers fill out a “208” card, police lingo for an index-card-sized document used as an investigative tool and, according to Chief Bill Blair, a way to “get to know” the neighbourhood.
Robinson does not know how many have been filled out on him.
In a freedom of information request that spanned nearly seven years, the Star obtained six years’ worth of contact-card data from Toronto police.
The Star analysis shows race, age and gender are big factors in who gets stopped. Looking at blacks and whites of all ages, blacks are three times more likely to be stopped.
Male blacks aged 15-24 are stopped and documented 2.5 times more than white males the same age.
In each of the city’s 74 police patrol zones, the Star analysis shows that blacks were documented at significantly higher rates than their overall census population by zone, and that in many zones, the same holds true for “brown” people — mainly people of South Asian, Arab and West Asian backgrounds.
“It doesn’t matter what type of neighbourhood you live in or what type of neighbourhood you’re travelling through, if you are black you are much more likely to attract the attention of the police and therefore have a contact card filled out,” says University of Toronto criminologist Scot Wortley, who reviewed the Star analysis.
In one of two interviews for this story, Blair said he understands that people may think they are being unfairly stopped. He said police are targeting neighbourhoods where the highest level of “victimization” occurs. He said these are often “racialized” neighbourhoods.
The collateral damage is law-abiding civilians who feel they are being treated unfairly because they are black. Although blacks make up 8.4 per cent of Toronto’s population, they account for three times as many contact cards.
Robinson, who wears his hair in short dreads, is troubled by this. And he’s far from alone. Max Rose, 16, who is regularly questioned by police in the Jane and Finch-area building he lives in, says he feels embarrassed when neighbour gather to watch.
Kasim St. Remy, 14, was recently stopped and questioned by police. He hadn’t done anything wrong. This bothers his mother, Clemee Joseph, yet she sees the stopping of young men of colour as necessary, if imperfect.
“It is hard for me when the police stop him to question him and have him on their radar but, as you know, in the past it has been all black young men killing each other,” says Joseph, 39. “I know that my son is a good kid, but sometimes his friends may not be.”
For Joseph, the other side of this issue is preserved under glass, in the framed pictures of her other son that crowd a living room table in her west end apartment. Last May, Jarvis St. Remy, 18, was killed in what she believes was a case of mistaken identity. St. Remy had no history with police, who have yet to make an arrest.
“I don’t like the stereotyping of this ... they get the good kids and the bad kids all in one,” she says. “But that is what is happening with the black kids, so that’s who they have to stop.”
Differences between black and white carding rates are highest in more affluent, mostly white areas of the city, such as North Toronto and the Kingsway, the Star found. Criminologist Wortley calls this the “out-of-place” phenomenon.
It’s a natural thing to expect from officers on the lookout of for things unusual or different, says Wortley, who oversaw a police stop data-collection pilot project by Kingston police.
Neither Blair nor Police Services Board chair Alok Mukherjee had a ready explanation for the city-wide pattern of disparity. Mukherjee said he would like to know more about whom police choose to document, and the reasons why. Blair suggests that every patrol zone has its “main street” where police are more active, and the demographics of people in those areas may account for this city-wide pattern.
The Star’s analysis of contact-card data found that most people police documented had not been charged criminally in the previous six years. Looking at 2008, four out of five who were carded did not show up in a criminal database also obtained by the Star.
There is a much smaller number of repeat offenders with serious criminal histories who are being checked up on with greater frequency.
Chief Blair estimates Toronto has 1,400 hard-core gang members and another, larger group of people suffering from mental health and addiction problems. Both end up receiving a disproportionate amount of intentional police attention. Two of Toronto’s most documented people in 2008 are female street prostitutes working in the downtown core. Another in the top 10 is a middle-aged panhandler from Newfoundland.
The cards pay off when police investigating serious crimes find links to associates, potential witnesses and suspects. The cards have also been used to obtain search warrants and are sometimes entered as evidence in criminal trials.
The Star found cases where convicted murderers had many 208 cards in their past, and some where they had none.
Colves “Jacko” Meggoe was a 50-year-old community activist who was gunned down in the foyer of his apartment building in 2006. At trial, one of the accused, 39-year-old Mark Cain, produced an alibi. Police used a 208 card to prove the man providing the alibi was not with Cain. Cain and his nephew were both recently convicted of the murder. Together, the two men had 33 208s. The man who offered the alibi had nine.
“That 208 tied everything together,” Homicide Det. John Biggerstaff says.
Mike McCormack, newly elected police union president, was working as a cop up until four months ago in 51 Division. He had spent 10 years in major crimes and gang intelligence. He calls the cards “invaluable.
“You’re recording data, setting up associations, knowing who’s involved (in gang activity). It puts people in certain locations.”
McCormack recalled a recent case in which two men were caught on video during a home invasion. Police knew the identity of one man but not the other. So they pulled the 208 card of the first man and looked up his associates. One of them had a criminal history, and thus there was a mugshot on file. “Lo and behold, it was the same guy as on the video.”
Senior officers with Toronto Police Service also provided an example of the cards working. They closed a sexual assault case at a York University residence in 2007 when, with one suspect in hand, they searched his 208 cards and found the accomplice. Both have been convicted.
The carding of citizens in non-criminal encounters is something most police services do. It has been beefed up in Toronto under Blair’s tenure as chief as part of the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS), introduced in 2006 in response to a spate of violence that led to 2005 becoming known as the Year of the Gun. The strategy involves a two-pronged approach: old-style community policing combined with a continued, heavy presence wherever and whenever required.
These officers are culled from units across the city and are often unfamiliar with the areas they flood.
Ask people in affected areas and they will say there has been a notable drop in drug dealing and violent crime since the advent of TAVIS. Police statistics bear that out. While some of the criminals have ended up locked away, others have dispersed.
“Once (the police) presence is there, (the dealers) go somewhere else, it just moves on to another space,” says Winston Larose, a community activist in the Jane-Finch area and a psychiatric nurse. “But some people in the area are saying there is some relief. All we know is that it is quiet, but the quiet is at the price of people’s freedom, and sense of freedom.”
Blair said nine out of 10 youths stopped and documented on a street corner may be perfectly good kids, and the encounter might leave them “pissed at us.”
“Those relationships are the toughest things,” says Blair. He expects his officers to be sensitive to how the youth feel and explain themselves. Even then, he acknowledges, the encounters may not go well.
While there are myriad social and economic factors and other explanations for this unbalance, Chief Blair says racial bias can be part of the mix. And it comes in different forms, from intentional racial profiling to automatic, or implicit, bias that can affect decisions made by good people who do not think of themselves as biased.
It is to be expected, says Blair. “We recruit from the human race.”
A request for contact data and another for police arrest, charge and ticket data were made in 2003, as a follow-up to the Star’s groundbreaking 2002 series on race, policing and crime in Toronto, which used police arrest and charge data to show that black people, in certain circumstances, were treated more harshly than whites. The data also showed that blacks then were 3.3 times more likely to be charged with violent crimes.
The series led to an Ontario Human Rights Commission inquiry into the impacts of racial profiling on society in general.
A repeat of the 2002 analysis looking at arrest and charge data from 2003 to 2008 shows those results have changed little.
Internally much has changed. Immediately upon taking over as chief in 2005, Blair acknowledged that racial bias is a problem in policing, as it is elsewhere in society, and took steps to deal with it. Since then, Toronto police have notably improved the number of minority recruits and have promoted members of visible minorities into higher ranks. They’ve also embarked on a unique partnership with the Ontario Human Rights Commission to improve human resources practices, and how police serve the public.
“Police services, not just in Ontario, but across the country, and to some extent, internationally, are watching with great attention the work that we are doing,” says Barbara Hall, Ontario’s Human Rights Chief Commissioner. “There’s no question that having chief Blair stand up, you know, to his peers, and acknowledge racial profiling exists within the Toronto Police Service ... gives permission in a sense to other services to acknowledge it.”
Meanwhile, stopping and carding individuals is considered good police work. And although Chief Blair says there is no quota or promotion incentive, card counts are used to measure officers’ performance. Some who are carded may never know that they have become part of the data collection.
Chief Blair points to slight decreases in the number of cards filled out in the past two years. “And it’s because we now have a much better understanding of (who) those who represent the greatest risk are.
“It doesn’t mean that we’re having less contacts. In fact, we’re having more. But now that we know who the bad guys are, and there are bad guys out there, they’re getting much more focused attention from us.”
The Star analysis shows police begin documenting youth in certain “at-risk” neighbourhoods in serious numbers when they are on the cusp of becoming teenagers. The carding peaks in the late teens and gradually diminishes as people reach their 30s and 40s.
Young people interviewed by the Star say they don’t feel they have any choice but to stop and answer police questions in these encounters. They are often asked to prove who they are. To walk away or refuse to produce ID, which in many cases is their constitutional right, might result is arousing further suspicion and hassle. In some cases, basketball games come to a halt as police do their work. Complying, which sometimes involves the emptying of pockets, means the play resumes sooner.
“It’s hard,” says Max Rose, 16, who lives in an apartment on Tobermory Dr. “I spent a weekend in Vaughan, and I can go outside and play basketball all day and all night. But in Jane and Finch, the police will come on their bicycles in the summertime and then, like, they stop your game to ask you your name, ‘What are you guys doing?’ Dumb stuff like that. They’re just like a pestilence in people’s life.”
While a cop can walk up to anyone and ask questions, a citizen does not have to answer those questions, said Osgoode Hall law professor Alan Young. If in a vehicle, the driver may be compelled to show identification or give a statement. An officer can do a “protective pat-down” and search the person if he feels anything resembling a weapon.
David Tanovich, a University of Windsor law professor and author of The Colour of Justice: Policing Race in Canada, has been a critic of the documenting of people in mostly non-criminal encounters, calling it a “no walk” list for young men in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, where more people tend to be of colour. He questions whether the practice of detaining people and requiring identification in order to document and track them is even legal.
“And if it is that kids can’t walk to school without having to stop, show their ID and have the officers fill out contact cards, that’s heightened surveillance, which is exactly what the essence of racial profiling is all about.”
In a letter replying to the Star, Canadian Civil Liberties Association general counsel Nathalie Des Rosiers also took issue with the questioning and carding practice.
“Regardless of intentions, police questioning can be intimidating and coercive,” writes Des Rosiers. “When perceived as excessive of discriminatory, it can create distrust in law enforcement, undermine public faith in police, and, ultimately, weaken efforts to root out and punish crime.”
Elementary school teacher Robinson wanted to be a police officer when he was younger. In 2003, he gave anonymous testimony in the human rights inquiry into racial profiling regarding 10 encounters he had had with Toronto police between 2000 and 2002, in which he believed his skin colour was a factor. Out of the 10 incidents, nine involved traffic stops and most resulted in no ticket. He was in his mid 20s then.
The Star tracked Robinson down at Oakridge Junior Public School to see what’s changed for him. He’s just bought a house, is working on a master’s thesis and is coaching both the boys’ and girls’ school basketball teams. He also recently wrote a paper on student perspectives on having police officers in their schools.
The number of times he’s been pulled over by police since he testified? He smiles and says he’s lost count. About 20, he guesses. He does not have a criminal record.
Robinson has taken to hanging his TDSB ID card from his car’s rear-view mirror. He says police change their tone when they see it.
“Policing is important,” he says. “I totally support the police, but I support them when they go at it from an objective perspective, where, no matter who you are, if you did the crime, you get the consequences. If I am speeding, I’m supposed to get the same consequence as someone else who is speeding, no matter what. If I’m driving and I get pulled over for no reason, it should happen to everybody, not just me, and that’s how I see it.”
It’s a Friday morning in December, and in his seventh floor office at Toronto police headquarters on College St., Chief Blair learns that one of four people shot overnight on Falstaff Ave. has become the city’s 55th homicide victim of 2009. Not good, but not bad, considering totals from previous years, including 2005, when 79 people were killed, many by guns.
Perhaps cards will help detectives piece this one together.
Blair points to a police map showing violent crime hotspots and describes a pattern that creeps up again and again in studies of Toronto neighbourhoods facing challenges. It’s an unlucky horseshoe shape, more of a “Nike swoosh,” as Blair puts it. It’s where there is poverty and lack of opportunity. And more of the people in these situations are members of visible minorities.
“Everybody knows exactly what we’re pointing at,” says Blair, “and it’s where the violence takes place, the shootings, and it’s tragically consistent.”
These areas, the Star found, are also where the gap between the number of contact cards filled out and arrests made is greatest.
Deputy Chief Keith Forde, the city’s first black deputy, would like to see the disparity in who is carded shrink away, but he believes black people are carded more often because black people are disproportionately being charged with violent crimes and disproportionately the victims of violent crimes. Seeking out suspects based on witness descriptions in areas where more black people live, he explains, results in more blacks being stopped.
“These are things that you cannot dispute,” Forde said in an interview. “So, yes, you can see the contact cards being out of proportion. Are we doing something to try and alleviate that? Sure we are. Sure we are.”
The Star's Investigative Team all contributed to this story: Jim Rankin, David Bruser, Moira Welsh, Brett Popplewell, Michele Henry, Diana Zlomislic and Dale
Brazao.
Focus on historic sites of Canada’s African Diaspora
Michaëlle Jean
Modern day exploitation in the form of child slaves, enslaved domestic workers and indentured sex workers serve as stark reminders that slavery is still present in many guises, says former Canadian Governor-General Michaëlle Jean.
Jean issued the warning last week in her endorsement of The Harriet Tubman Institute proposal to the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Slave Route Project that historic sites associated with people of African descent in Canada constitute an Itinerary of Memory.
In her keynote address at York University to launch the proposal, Jean said the project - accepted by UNESCO's Intercultural Dialogue Section head Dr. Ali Moussa Iye who was in Toronto for last week's Tubman Centre Summer Institute - is one of the most innovative academic initiatives of its kind in Canada.
"Today, we are inviting all Canadians to join us in ushering in a deeper and more extensive understanding of the African Diaspora's presence in our country by confronting our past together because we must acknowledge the Itinerary of Memory initiative is a culmination of decades of meticulous research, of genealogical exploration and political advocacy by historians, anthropologists, teachers, public officials and human rights activists of all hues, many of whom are here with us today," said Haitian-born Jean.
"I would say that through your unique contributions, you have conferred greater visibility upon the historic sites dotting the Canadian landscape which bears witness to the enslavement of African and indigenous people. Today, you bring new impetus to the struggle and with the blessings of UNESCO, you are establishing a procedure according to which undiscovered sites can and will be designated Sites of Memory within Canada.
"In so doing, you join the efforts in a transnational circle of solidarity which finds unity in the belief that knowing the history of slavery is essential to seeing a global culture of peace flourish around the world. And to that belief, I say yes, I concur for our story is fundamentally about lifting humanity out of the sinking sand of barbarism and injustice. Our story is about finding the strength and fortitude to shatter the walls of indifference and tyranny that has held us back for so long.
"Our story is about instilling a global ethical fellowship that emboldens humanity to prevent the crimes of the past from dictating the trajectory of the present and the future."
Jean, UNESCO's special envoy for Haiti, thanked those individuals who spent years doing the groundwork to formulate the proposal for staying the course in spite of rejection by their peers, ostracism by colleagues and ridicule by friends.
"You resisted the temptation to give in and thanks to your tenacity, the country will reap the fruits of your labour," she said. "For this initiative will ensure the story of Canada's African Diaspora ignites hope in the hearts of many, reminding everyone of our great responsibility to safeguard the sacred principles of justice, equality and liberty. I am persuaded that memory is not simply there for us to meditate upon. It can help elucidate certain issues concealed deep within our relations with ourselves.
"In launching this site, we not only pay tribute to women and men who survived one of the worst barbaric ordeals in the history of human kind. We honour our responsibility to seek out truth and wisdom from the past so that the errors of yesterday are never repeated. The persistence of slavery and slave-like practices and human trafficking today should serve as a clear warning that we must continue to be vigilant."
The Harriet Tubman Institute's director, Paul Lovejoy, said 11 sites have been identified initially with the intention of undertaking a program of research and there are plans for further designations across Canada.
He said the project is part of a broader initiative to insert the African past into Canada's national narrative.
"This initiative builds on earlier efforts to reveal the importance of African-Canadian heritage such as promoted by the Ontario Black History Society and Ontario Heritage Trust," said Lovejoy.
The proposal was made on August 23 which is the UNESCO-proclaimed International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade & its Abolition. The UN also designated this year to People of African Descent.
Iye said The Tubman Institute's proposal comes at a time when countries that have participated in the slave trade and slavery continue to ignore the tragic history in their heritage policies.
"However, more and more countries are recognizing the cultural diversity of society and the necessity of taking into account the corresponding diversity of memory," he said. "They are more and more convinced that their democratic citizenship implies the equal recognition of painful memories of the different communities that constitute nations.
"The recognition of Sites of Memory related to the slave trade should be part of any serious policy for a democratic management of national narratives and memory."
Ontario Heritage Trust chair Dr. Thomas Symons also pledged support for the proposal.
"Ontario's Black community has made and continue to make an enormously important social, cultural and economic contribution to the life and development of the province," he said. "The rich and diverse history of this community forms a fundamental and very important part of Ontario's heritage."
A descendant of slaves who came to Canada prior to the American Civil War, Bryan Prince has a profound interest in the Underground Railroad and is actively involved with the Buxton National Historic Site & Museum.
"The public knows the story (of slavery) in a general way, but with very few exceptions, much has been lost and forgotten," said Prince who is a member of The Harriet Tubman executive committee. "But we believe that everyone's narrative is compelling and worthy of being remembered. The challenges associated with uncovering the tiny details that are sprinkled around the continent and beyond - in museums, archives, attics and in memory - and presenting these stories have been daunting at times."
York University president Mamdouh Shoukri said The Tubman Institute is doing a great job in reflecting what the university stands for which is academic excellence, equity and social justice.
