Justice Michael Tulloch has striven for clarity where there was confusion.To simplify and codify.He produced an exhaustive 310-page report probing the application and effectiveness of an Ontario regulation intended to limit the impact of street checks — specifically random solicitation of information by the police, known as carding, which has disproportionately affected, even traumatized, visible minorities, primarily Blacks and the Indigenous.But already the explicitness that Tulloch sought to catalogue in his recommendations — bottom line, there is no merit to carding; it’s a clumsy tool for gathering relevant objective-based data and should be halted across the province, end of story — has touched off debate and dissatisfaction at both ends of the spectrum, from those who absolutely oppose any collecting of personal details to those who cleave to the belief that further handcuffing police will disastrously prevent law enforcement from doing their duty.This clash was evident on Friday morning, when Tulloch formally presented his report at a news conference, four days after it was released online.Tulloch, who sits on the Ontario Court of Appeal, had been tasked with undertaking the review in June 2017 by the previous Liberal government at Queen’s Park. From the podium, his compressed presentation seemed unambiguous enough.Read more:‘Stops must be based on more than a hunch or Spidey sense,’ says judge in charge of report on street checksPolice carding should be banned in Ontario, independent review saysOpinion | Edward Keenan: Random police carding doesn’t work. Let’s hope that fact finally ends the debateStreet checks haven’t been and won’t be ditched. But relying on discriminatory stereotypes to stop and question individuals, justifying that as cop intuition, a “Spidey” sense of the suspicious, is fundamentally wrong. Directed at Blacks — who are 17 times more likely to be str ...
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