police deny 'carding'

BY MOHAMMED ADAM, THE OTTAWA CITIZENJULY 15, 2012

Criminology and criminal justice professor Darryl T. Davies says he fears Ottawa police are collecting information on innocent people. Photograph by: James Park, The

Are the police in Ottawa collecting personal information on innocent people without their knowledge and using it against them? That question is at the heart of a dispute between a Carleton University criminologist and the Ottawa police that has spawned a complaint to the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, a provincial watchdog that investigates police behaviour.

Darryl Davies, a Carleton criminal justice professor, claims that the Ottawa police routinely collect personal information on people they encounter, including those who’ve never been arrested, charged or involved in any crime, and store it for future use or reference. He says information on people who’ve not broken the law should not be kept by the police, and he wants the practice — generally known as carding — curbed, or subjected to stringent oversight. The controversial practice is used by police forces in Toronto and New York, where some have criticized it as being discriminatory, because most of those carded are minorities. But it has never been an issue here; and while the city’s police flatly deny that they employ the tactic, a recent incident involving one of Davies’s students has left the professor with the strong belief that carding is practised in Ottawa.

In April of this year, Andrew Tysowski, a fourth-year Carleton University student, was stopped by an Ottawa police officer for running a red light at St. Joseph and Orléans Boulevard. Asked if he’d ever been in trouble with the police, Tysowski “confidently said ‘No.’ ”

But after a computer check in his car, he alleges, the officer came back and called him a liar, because the check turned up a report of a 2006 incident during which the police officer said Tysowski was “an asshole with OC Transpo.”

Tysowski says he had long since forgotten about the incident with OC Transpo, in which he says two security officers stopped him at Place D’Orleans station and demanded his ID. Tysowski says an argument ensued when he asked for an explanation, but the officers eventually told him they were after a robbery suspect and that he fit the description. Tysowski says he handed them his driver’s licence and college ID card, and, satisfied, they let him go. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of it, a case of mistaken identity.

Until the April encounter with police, that is.

“The cop’s words were, ‘Don’t be an asshole to us next time’, ” Tysowski alleges. “He said, ‘Anyone else it would be a warning, but because of your record from 2006, I am giving you a ticket.’

“My main concern was how what happened with OC Transpo would end up in a police computer somewhere. I was baffled and intimidated by the whole thing.”

Tysowski sought advice from criminal justice professor Davies, who subsequently complained to Police Services Board Chair Eli El-Chantiry, who referred the matter to Chief Charles Bordeleau. The police chief then advised the professor and his student to file a complaint to the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, an arms-length civilian agency of the Ministry of the Attorney General that oversees the investigation of public complaints against Ontario police forces.

Tysowski says he has nothing against the officer, that all he wants is to find out how the 2006 incident ended up in the records of the police, and to get those records expunged.

“This could show up on my record everywhere, and I want it removed,” he says. “But I can’t go to OC Transpo and say, ‘This is my side of it.’ There is no way for me to enter a police station and have a discussion about it. It is written in stone, and there is no way to contest it.”

The Ottawa police deny that they engage in carding. They acknowledge, however, that they collect vast amounts of information as part of their crime-fighting and intelligence-gathering mandate. And it is all within the law, they say.

For its part, OC Transpo acknowledges that since 2007 its constables have been filing “incident reports” to the police, but claim the information does not end up in anyone getting a record. OC Transpo also claims to have no record of the Tysowski incident from 2006.

The police however, would not comment on the incident involving Tysowski, saying it would be wrong to talk about something that could be subject of a complaint, and possibly an official investigation.

A Citizen request for an interview with El-Chantiry was referred to Ottawa police Supt. Ty Cameron, head of the Criminal Investigations Directorate. Cameron says collecting information is an integral part of police work, and that there is nothing sinister about it. He says the police use a system called “street checks” to record everything from someone calling in with a tip to someone lodging a complaint. And when the police stop someone engaged in suspicious behaviour — even on a traffic stop — the information is recorded.

“(A) street check is when an officer is called to a scene, responds to something or self-engages: The behaviour of the person, the people they are with or what is happening, we will put (that) in a street check,” Cameron says.

“We are in a computer era, and when we are dispatched to a call, when we stop a car, the information is recorded. This is not some nefarious thing we are doing here. All it is an investigative tool so our detectives have a starting place.”

Cameron says if a suspect is investigated and found not to have done anything wrong, the person is cleared, and there are no “ramifications.”

For instance, such information doesn’t show up in a police records check, but it remains in the database as part of valuable police intelligence.

Cameron says it is important to collect and keep such information because it helps not only to solve crime today, but to crack cold cases by connecting pieces of fresh information to something that has been lying dormant for years. “We keep people in our databases, but when does the information become not important? We have cold cases, and we don’t know what evidence will come up 20 years from now,” he says.

“The information assists us in solving thousands and thousands of crimes because it puts the linkages to who is where, who is associated to what and whom.”

Davies, though, says linking crime-fighting to keeping private information on innocent people is a disingenuous way of avoiding accountability.

He says no one would deny the police the right to collect information on criminals, terrorists or gang members.

But once people have been cleared of any wrongdoing — or if they were not involved in any wrongdoing in the first place — police should not hold onto that information on them.

He wonders how many people walking the streets don’t know that the police have information about them, and he wants the city to answer for it.

The Ottawa police may call their practice something else, the professor says, but it is no different from carding.

“Collecting information on people who are known to police, have lengthy criminal records, are potential suspects in terrorist activities is accepted and understood. And under the Highway Act, people who are charged with an offence understand that the information is recorded and this is authorized by provincial law,” he says.

“But why (are) Ottawa police collecting information on people who have no records, are not terrorists, or part of some cold case? It is a travesty that the and OC Transpo are arbitrarily collecting personal information on contacts with Ottawa citizens who have neither been charged nor convicted of any offence under the Criminal Code or Highway Traffic Act.”

And though the police insist there’s nothing unusual about their collection of information, that it is a common-place and valuable tool, Davies believes that everyone should be concerned — not least, he says, “such information can be adversely used against a private citizen without his or her knowledge, since the information is shared with other agencies.”

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