Lies, Damned Lies, and Lack of Statistics

When I got to know Ari Goldkind in 2014, along with the rest of Toronto, I found him a little brash, and more than a little self-important. That’s not meant as a knock; in a city that had been turned upside-down by a lunatic mayor and his coterie of enablers, perhaps a little straight talk was needed at the time. He spoke passionately about adequate funding for public transit, addressing Toronto’s embarrassing lack of accessibility for people with disabilities, and on the need for better practices within the Toronto Police Service. Given Ari’s history as a criminal defence lawyer, it was easy for most to take him at his word that he stood for better relations between the police and the communities they serve. From his campaign website:

Establishing a panel to identify better police practices across the spectrum, learning from the old and moving to the new. Particularly when it comes to use of force, de-escalation, and Mental Health issues. And then actually enforcing these changes. Which is simply not done now. The overwhelming principle is that yes, the Police are to serve and protect us. For years now, a huge segment of Toronto feel, with justification, that it is us vs. them.

How times have changed. After Ari’s fourth-place finish in the mayoral race, wherein he managed to pull less than half a per cent of the popular vote, he’s been engaged on another losing campaign — speaking up in support of carding. If you’re not familiar with the practice, carding (also known as street checks) is a Canadian spin on racial profiling. Police will stop civilians not suspected of any crime, ask for identification, and log their personal information in one of many massive databases over which the public has no oversight. In municipalities where studies have been conducted on the racial identity of those stopped and carded, people of colour (especially those who identify as black, indigenous, and south Asian) are disproportionately targeted.

Former Ontario Ombudsman André Marin once attacked carding as “wrong and illegal.” The Ontario Human Rights Commission called the practice “fertile ground for racial profiling”. Several Toronto city councillors and other prominent citizens gathered for a press conference to demand an immediate end to the practice. According to their statement, “(Carding) violates the human rights of citizens.”

And yet, there is a thin undercurrent of carding supporters in Toronto who believe black and brown Torontonians owe a social tax to create the perception of “community safety.” Joe Warmington, when he is able to detach his face from Rob Ford’s council chair, is one of them. Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, a 4chan thread given flesh and a high-paid job in the public service, is another. For whatever reason, Goldkind has decided to hitch his horse to their wagon and ride into a regressive, over-policed past we’ve been trying to escape for more than 30 years. After a disastrous appearance on CH this past April, in which he was gathered up and deposited in a wastebin by Desmond Cole, Goldkind returns with this gem in the Toronto Sun:

…when you apply for a mortgage, your bank reviews your credit history and assesses your future risk based upon your credit history and those of people like you.

If you are rejected, it’s because, statistically, you pose a greater risk to the banking system and its operating costs.

Sure it’s not fair. But it’s business. That’s life.

Now let’s look at our city.

It too is a business, with huge operating costs, including policing, fire services, ambulances, welfare agencies and more.

Its goal is to stay financially viable and serve its customers — us.

Now, suppose someone drew up a bias-free actuarial table that showed one group of people, representing a certain age category and a relatively small percentage of the population, was responsible for a disproportionately large percentage of violent crime.

You can see where this is going. Let’s forget that it most certainly would be racism for Equifax to consider my black next-door-neighbour when compiling my credit score. In Goldkind’s imagination, profiling is not the product of white supremacy, but a logical response to statistics. But the route Goldkind travels to arrive at this conclusion is not only illogical, it’s a direct violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states in plain language under section 9 that “Everyone has the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned.” Government is not a business, and Canadians are not shareholders. There is no test of Charterworthiness to meet before a Canadian’s human rights are respected; they simply exist and are unassailable by whatever prejudices that Goldkind, Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack, and other carding proponents may have.

Let’s back that up for a second. Even in the absence of Charter protection from carding, the “statistics” argument for carding is itself a red herring. While Goldkind and other carding advocates point to racial statistics, our police do not collect or analyze crime statistics by race. There are no publicly available police studies, and no StatCan data to lean on, which makes the theory of a “bias free actuarial table” rather perplexing. In order for this hypothetical table to exist, it would need data to populate it. All we have at the moment is the imagination of Ari Goldkind, which, as far as I have been able to tell, is not bias-free.

We do have statistics on carding, but they certainly don’t help Goldkind’s case any. The Toronto Star found that black people were up to 5 times more likely to be carded in so-called priority neighbourhoods, but nearly 10 times more likely to be profiled in high income neighbourhoods, including the downtown core. Taking our crime rate into consideration, which has been on a general downward trend since 2005’s “Summer of the Gun,” the policing of black bodies begins to look less like “safety” and more like “unsanctioned segregation.”

Of course, there is the matter of black overrepresentation in Canada’s federal prisons, but even those statistics do not point to a clear cause. Aggressive prosecution for nonviolent and drug-related crimes, the cumulative effect of repeat police encounters, unbelievably disproportionate rates for black and Indigenous children remanded to the care of Childrens’s Aid, and other factors point to Canadians of colour being swept into the penal system, but do not point to a higher propensity to commit crime. In other words, our justice system isn’t equipped to answer the question of who is doing the dirt; only to answer what happens to who gets caught. For people of colour in Canada, what happens is poor legal defense, low likelihood of either bail or parole, and a very high likelihood of physical abuse, segregation, and humiliation at the hands of prison guards.

But all of this is moot in the face of one inconvenient question. What is the statistical evidence that carding even works? So far, the Toronto Police Service has not produced one shred of evidence that carding is statistically proven to reduce crime, or even that it functions as an investigative aid. In fact, current Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders has himself commissioned reports on the efficacy of carding. None of the results have ever been released to the public. One would think that if carding were such an effective tool, our police would wallpaper their offices with copies of those reports. And yet, all we get are anecdotes and flawed thought exercises. (I, for example, have been known to walk out of the dark space between two houses after midnight. I have two huskies, and when they gotta go, they gotta go. I am not required to identify myself to police in order to walk my dogs.)

As for the matter of demands for carding to be more “equitable,” the man ought to pay attention. No one is asking for carding to be more broadly applied, so everyone gets an equal taste of what it’s like to be bullied, harassed, and beaten into compliance by police.

We’re asking for carding to be abolished altogether.

Throughout his article, Ari not only substitutes his imagination for statistical proof, but prioritizes collective responsibility over individual rights. For carding advocates, this is standard motus operandi, and it is tiresome. It ignores the dozens of community safety meetings that happen every year in Toronto’s neighbourhoods, and it ignores the dozens of charities, churches, and community organizations who have made it their mission to divert youth towards excellence, and away from guns and gangs. It is not a Charter requirement that people of colour convince ignorant hacks that our rights finally deserve to be respected.

Carding advocates consistently speak on community issues they either don’t know or don’t care to know, and ask the public to accept their ignorance over our experience. There is nothing Goldkind presents in this Sun article that couldn’t have been gleaned from the Sun’s comments section, and it’s about time we stopped giving the man attention. If he’s this hell-bent on lost causes, the rest of us don’t need to follow him down that path.