City police must conform to new anti-racial profiling regulations by 2017 despite the chief’s criticism of what he believes is GTA-specific legislation.
“We’ve had legislation in the past that we think is onerous and resource intensive,” said Police Chief J.P. Levesque during a Tuesday morning police board meeting.
“This is one of those and you know I’m not overly happy that we are moving forward with this but we have to move forward, it’s legislation.”
Levesque isn’t against keeping such issues like racial profiling in check, instead he believes the legislation is a response to an issue specific to Toronto.
Having the local police service conform to legislation that solves a Toronto issue is seen by the chief as inefficient use of resources without any real local benefit.
“(Ontario) made this a regulation and if you read the regulation there are things that the services board is responsible for and there are things that the chief is responsible for, so those are my responsibilities and we will move forward,” he added
The issue of carding, or street checks, dominated headlines in the GTA after it was found to target that city’s black residents unfairly.
The Toronto Police Service defended the ID-collecting, saying it was an integral part of policing.
The province eventually became involved in the debate and in March 2016 Ontario issued a new regulation regarding the collection of identifying information from members of the public.
The regulation has provided rules for voluntary police-public interactions designed to ensure that the interactions aren’t discriminatory.
“The province is giving us ‘til the end of the year to implement certain things,” Levesque said.
“We initially had until July 1 to have this policy in place, but the province changed it and they gave the boards till July 1 to start the policy.”
In June 2015, a Thunder Bay Police Spokesman told tbnewswatch.com that the controversial method of carding, or street checks, was not practiced by local officers.
The street checks policy was approved by the police board Tuesday morning, which was the first step.
The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police designed a draft document that services where able to adopt locally.
The regulation establishes new training, data management and reporting requirements that police services must implement along with the development of board policy in five areas.
“There’s also a document that we have to handout over to the individual, there’s all kinds of training for our officers and I have long said there needs to be a big push for public education as well,” he said.
“I think there’s going to be some unnecessary arrests for people who don’t understand the regulation.”
He believes public education shouldn’t be the police’s responsibility, it should be the responsibility of the province.
With the extra training for officers, and development of certain documents there is going to be some money spent in regards to this policy.
“I think based on the first quarter variance we are in a situation that we are likely to see a negative variance again,” he said.
“I can’t worry about it, we are trying to do the best we can to stay within the budget, we’ve underfunded a number of accounts but I think we are going to see the results of that at the end of the year.”
