Calgary police 'carding' practice to be modernized, made more accountable
Personal information recorded by officers in non-arrest encounters will have to be justified
Calgary's police chief says the force's procedures for "carding" — where officers stop people for questioning and record their personal information — will be modernized and made more accountable.
The Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre held a seminar Tuesday at the University of Calgary to compare carding in Calgary and Toronto, where the practice was recently reined in by the province following allegations that it often amounts to racial profiling.
Police Chief Roger Chaffin told the participants that the lessons learned in that city have informed the changes being made in Calgary.
"The carding practice in Toronto was a wakeup call to start looking at, what are our practices looking like, how do we account for what we're doing … is it reasonable and necessary…" he said, noting the procedures used by the Calgary Police Service (CPS) are out of step with modern expectations around rights and privacy.
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"It caused us to review our entire program."
Chaffin says by the end of October, the present Calgary Police Service (CPS) system for carding — or "check-up slips," as it's also known — will be decommissioned and replaced with a more accountable, modernized procedure that will be called "info posts."
"If someone collects data on someone that's non-criminal, but merely based on suspicion, there's going to be a strong element, that our intelligence group has to go through that data and score it and understand it — is it relevant, real data or is it not. And if it's not, if it simply was not relevant or necessary, it can be released," he said.
"Why that person, why that place, what were you attempting to garner by gathering that information."
Under the new system, information that is determined that cannot be justifiably kept on file will be deleted within a year, Chaffin said.
As it prepares to introduce its revised procedure, the CPS will be meeting with the Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association, which also made a presentation at Tuesday's seminar.
The group's president, Kelly Ernst, said data obtained through a freedom of information request revealed that communities with the highest number of visible minorities — especially District 5 in the northeast — have higher rates of carding.
"I think it's really important for the Calgary Police Service to look into this issue and determine why carding is so high in a region that is so diverse."
Chaffin told the seminar that the CPS is confronting the question of bias.
He says the force is introducing a new, mandatory "fair and impartial policing program" by the end of the year to help ensure officers' police work is not clouded by bias towards racial minorities or other groups.
"I think this issue of carding, the conversations we've had with Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties particularly, really brought it back, that if we are going to stand up a new program, we also have to re-imagine, re-communicate how bias is understood in the organization," he said.
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With files from Mike Symington