A 300-plus page review of carding and police street checks in Ontario is now in the hands of the province, and what comes of it is dependent on the political will and the Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Doug Ford.Five days after the New Year’s Eve ball drop of the report, Justice Michael Tulloch and his team met with reporters and the public to talk about its results and recommendations at a downtown Toronto hotel that is a brisk 10-minute walk away from the politics of Queen’s Park.Tulloch, an Ontario Court of Appeal justice, and his team consulted with more than 2,200 people, including representatives from 34 police services, and received more than 100 written submissions.He soon learned the scope of the issue, and how it disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous and racialized groups.Tulloch’s report stresses the importance of training and making it clear to police what is expected of them in street check encounters, where “carding” — the complete randomness in choosing who to stop, question and document, and creating “a database for general intelligence purposes” — has no place.“Stops must be based on more than a hunch or Spidey sense,” said Tulloch, eliciting chuckles. But police must be able to engage with the communities they police, and citizens not feel “as though their name is being requested to appear in a police database.”Stops should not be made on the basis of race or other prohibited grounds of discrimination, including socio-economic status, Tulloch said.Tulloch made a point of addressing in his report, based on data, that the assertion by some that a drop in street checks caused a spike in shootings is “spurious.”His review was one of four, highly critical major reports into policing released within the past month, including a review of Thunder Bay Police Service by the Office of the Independent Police Review Director and an interim re ...
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