Amrik Singh Ahluwalia wasted no time charting a new direction for the force on Friday, renewing the fight against street checks.
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| Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star Amrik Singh Ahluwalia is the new chair of the Peel Police Services Board. |
Fri Jan 29 2016: “It doesn’t affect brown people and white people — it affects black males.”
With that sharp rebuke of a consultant’s report on police street checks — insisting that it missed the essence of the controversy — the man now heading oversight of Peel Region police made clear that change is coming to Canada’s third-largest police force.
Minutes after Amrik Singh Ahluwalia rose on Friday and moved to his new seat, following his unanimous election as chair of the Peel Police Services Board, he joined other members in calling for change.
The first issue: frustration with a consultant’s report commissioned by Police Chief Jennifer Evans.
“It was offensive,” said Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey, who just moments earlier had nominated Ahluwalia for the position of chair. “It was supporting the status quo.”
Ahluwalia’s leadership could spell trouble for Evans if she continues to challenge the board on the controversial issue of street checks, a police practice of stopping and recording personal information of people not involved in a criminal investigation, known in Toronto as “carding.”
The outgoing chair, Laurie Williamson, had sided with Evans on the issue. Ahluwalia says the practice is harmful and must end.
“It disproportionately affects one segment of the society,” Ahluwalia told the Star later. “It affects them significantly.”
In September, the Star published statistics gleaned from six years of street check data, obtained from the force under a freedom of information request, that revealed black individuals were three times as likely to be stopped by Peel police as whites.
The next day, Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie, Jeffrey, Ahluwalia and Norma Nicholson won a 4-3 vote to stop street checks, requesting that Evans take immediate action.
She refused to do so on the basis that street checks are an operational matter, about which they don’t have authority over her.
Anti-carding advocates, including the Law Union of Ontario, have issued rebuttals to this claim. In October, the provincial government announced it will ban the practice of random street checks.
Sophia Brown Ramsay, programming director for the Black Community Action Network of Peel, attended last week’s council meeting and said she is thrilled the police board has a new chair who supports her group’s goal of ending street checks.
“Oh my goodness, it is exactly what we have been pulling for. We have spoken to the board in the past. What I love about what our new chair said is we have to work collectively. It’s extremely encouraging to have someone from the South Asian community have that gusto, to say he wants to work with us.”
That kind of collaboration between Peel’s large visible minority groups would help overcome a lack of understanding about the impact of street checks, Ramsay said.
Board member Nicholson expressed concerns that the consultant’s report, presented by Louise Doucet and Liz Torlee of strategic marketing company TerraNova, exemplified that poor understanding — particularly in how it described three public consultations on the subject of street checks last fall.
She singled out a passage in the report that claims “very few young people” with “first-hand experience with street checks attended,” and that “many of those who did admitted to the facilitators (TerraNova) that they had been ‘called up’ for support by staunch opponents.” The report says “several” youths “were promised pizza in return for sharing their negative street check experiences.”
Nicholson called the passage “embarrassing.” She told the TerraNova directors not to be judgmental about youth who did take the time to attend the sessions and share their experiences, and asked Evans to remove the section about pizza inducements before the report was formally made public.
The consultant’s description did not match the Star’s observation of one session attended by a reporter, when numerous young black men, as well as some in their 30s and 40s, spoke emotionally about their own experiences with carding.
Ahluwalia told the presenters the same. “There were a lot of comments that were made that I think have been missed.”
Jeffrey told Evans and the report’s presenters that it did not square with much of what she heard at the public consultations. She mentioned a teacher with two young children who told the mayor he had been stopped for street checks three times, in front of them and even in front of his colleagues. “What was his crime? He was black.”
“He asked: ‘How do I teach my children to have respect for the police?’ when he was being regularly stopped.”
Evans said the report and the comments made by board members Friday would be a “topic of discussion again with my command team. There is a lot of work to be done,” she said, adding that there is a need “to build trust.”
“Not just in Peel, but policing in general is coming under scrutiny.”