Desmond Cole asks why it took so long for Toronto Mayor to oppose police "carding"

The Mayor of Toronto is calling on police to halt the practice of random stops known as "carding". But a black journalist who has been stopped many times wonders why the mayor took so long to speak out.

Mayor John Tory says that "carding" is a police strategy that has eroded the public's trust in the police force. "Carding" is the practice of randomly stopping people on the street, not to investigate a crime, but simply to record information. Many believe the practice has been used to specifically target people of colour in the city.

Cole recently published a feature article in Toronto Life magazine. In it, he wrote about the experience of being a black person who has been randomly stopped by Toronto police 50 times.

Cole tells As It Happens co-host Carol Off that he has heard from a lot of people who were touched by his story, including John Tory.

He says: "the issue here is that when we hear the term 'public safety', from police and authorities, we tend to trust. But, when in the name of public safety, you hear that people who the police themselves admit are suspected of nothing...that they're not just stopped, but that they're made to believe that they don't have the right to leave. That they are asked very personal questions and that all of the information is documented by the police and put into a database...that's what our police have been doing."

Cole adds: "It's very clear. 8.5% of Toronto's population is black. But, in 2013 black people were 27% of the people 'carded'. People say that this is happening in specific neighbourhoods where a lot of black people live, because those are high-crime neighbourhoods...yet the statistics themselves show that as a black man I stand a higher chance of being carded in a majority-white neighbourhood. So the more white residents that there are in a neighbourhood, the higher the proportion of black people who get stopped."

Last month As It Happens spoke with Jagmeet Singh, an Ontario NDP MPP who is a practicing Sikh. He told Carol he was randomly stopped numerous times by police dating back to when he was a young man studying law in Toronto.

"If [police] destroy the information that's already been collected under this completely unfair practice, then I believe we can say, we're getting somewhere," says Cole. 

Tory says he plans to go before Toronto's police board on June 18 and call for the practice to be eliminated. Meanwhile, the police union says it is "deeply concerned" by the move against carding.