Riding Through the 6ix with My Woes
It’s 2017 in Toronto and carding is dead. Long live carding.
What happened to Marcel Blackburn in my neighborhood one December night perfectly illustrates a number of the most pressing problems with with police accountability today. It also clearly show why the Ontario government’s regulations which “ended carding” on January 1st of this year won’t make a lick of a difference where so many obvious problems are concerned.
1) When TPS stops someone on the basis of race, they are still able to claim that it was because the person was in a “high drug laneway” — whatever that means — or that they have committed some traffic infraction. As long as they don’t say “Hey! Person of colour! Cease and desist with your negrotude immediately!”, they’re not discriminating on the basis of race.
2) Once they have detained this person, they can then physically and verbally intimidate them in an attempt to escalate the situation, thereby “giving them cause” to do what it was they wanted to do in the first place. Which in this case was perform a search all officers involved knew they were not within their rights to perform.
3) If the person in question manages to keep a cool head and attempt to de-escalate the situation because of the clear and present danger the police present to them, they can be ignored or rebuffed. If you’re allegedly being stopped for a traffic infraction, but the police refuse to give you a ticket or take your documentation, despite you offering it to them… you’re clearly not being stopped for a traffic infraction. Even moreso if they consider your attempt to give them these things to be suspicious.
4) Now we come to the issue of technology as panacea. This is the argument that surely everything will be fine if all the police are fitted with body cameras, for example. But in this case, at “key seconds” during the interaction the officers in question conspired to turn off their microphones (that at least was caught on tape), making it impossible to verify what was said. Because there is no legal requirement for an officer to keep their mic or body cam on, even Justices of the court can only “express concern” when police intentionally tamper with evidence, and then come back on camera with a different story.
5) It is also worth noting that this case demonstrates that diversity in policing is no silver bullet. It doesn’t matter that officers are women or people of colour (as was the case here), if the culture and system they inhabit is inherently white supremacist. Diversity without systemic change does nothing but exchange a malevolent monoculture for a malevolent mosaic.
In the end, the law did not protect Mr. Blackburn from abuse at the hands of police. What saved him in this case was the ineptitude of the officers who bullied and accosted him. Despite the massive power imbalance in their favour, they failed to craft a believable, coherent fiction. Thankfully, in this case Justice Bacchus was able to see through their bumbling attempts at deceit and admonish them for their “Kafkaesque behaviour”.
But what about those who may find themselves in a similar interaction with a better class of villain? For them, there is only Kafka’s sad assertion. “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”
