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Mayor Kennedy Stewart takes cautious approach on VPD ‘street check’ practice

Civil rights activist Desmond Cole was visiting Vancouver last week when he said he was ‘carded’ by police

Mayor Kennedy Stewart is not planning to make any immediate recommendations related to the Vancouver Police Department’s controversial practice of “street checks” in light of a recent incident near Stanley Park involving a black freelance journalist and civil rights activist from Toronto.

Stewart told reporters Tuesday he has to first be sworn in as chairperson of the Vancouver Police Board and learn more about what the police department is doing to address the issue of street checks or “carding” raised by Desmond Cole, the BC Civil Liberties Association and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs.

“I am keen to see what the Vancouver police has planned themselves before I kind of rush in and try to be a bull in a china shop,” said Stewart, who expressed his regret to Cole last Friday about the Nov. 13 incident involving a Vancouver police officer.

Cole posted a video on social media and wrote about an incident on Facebook in which he said an officer stopped him while walking to Stanley Park. Cole said the officer told him he stopped him for smoking in a public park, which is a bylaw offence.

“I was never in a park, just walking along a sidewalk minding my own business,” he wrote in his post. “The cop told me I had to give him my name or show some ID. When I refused, he detained me for 15 minutes, and repeatedly threatened to handcuff me and arrest me for obstruction of justice, if I didn’t identify myself.”

In his video, Cole said he was stopped for no justifiable reason, saying he had been “carded,” which he described as a coercive practice in which black and Indigenous peoples are frequently targeted and it can end in arrest, “being beaten, or worse.”

The officer did not arrest Cole or give him a ticket. The department has disputed Cole’s assessment of the incident. Const. Jason Doucette said Cole was stopped because he was smoking on the south side of Marina Square Park on Bayshore Drive.

“The claim made in the video is not accurate,” Doucette said. “A street check was not conducted and no information was recorded. The officer did approach Mr. Cole about a bylaw infraction. In this case, our officer used his discretion and chose not to serve a bylaw offence ticket.”

In his conversation with Stewart, Cole said, he gave the mayor “concrete steps” to end the practice of street checks, or carding. Those steps are: a requirement that police tell people their rights when stopped; non-criminal records collected by police should be destroyed; and issue a carbon receipt in “the extremely rare cases that police need to collect our information during a non-criminal confrontation.”

Cole, who planned to file a complaint with the department, said Stewart seemed receptive. The mayor told reporters Tuesday that Cole’s recommendations were “very reasonable.” Stewart will be sworn in Dec. 6 as chairperson of the police board, which sets policy for the department.

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The Vancouver Police Board has ordered an independent study on the VPD's practice of conducting street checks. Photo Dan Toulgoet

In September, the board ordered an independent study of the department’s practice of conducting street checks after data posted to the VPD’s website in May showed an overrepresentation of Indigenous and black people being stopped by officers.

The board wants the study done by July 2019. It also approved other measures for the department, including more training for officers, releasing street check data annually and assigning an officer to improve communication with the Indigenous community.

The data posted on the VPD’s website showed police conducted 97,281 street checks between 2008 and 2017. Of those checks, 15 per cent (14,536) were of Indigenous people and more than four per cent (4,365) of black people. Indigenous people make up just over two per cent of the population in Vancouver, and black people less than one per cent.

The police board ordered the study on the same day it received a 62-page VPD report that concluded the department’s practice of street checks was not discriminatory, as suggested by the BC Civil Liberties Association and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs.

“I’m a strong believer that our officers are doing a great job every day out there and street checks are used very judiciously in this city,” said Police Chief Adam Palmer following the meeting. “I also recognize that some members of the public do have concerns about police, in general, doing street checks. We are an open and transparent organization, and if they want a third party to come in and look at the books, we’re fine with that.”

The BC Civil Liberties Association and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs requested in June that an independent analysis of the police’s data be conducted and that people stopped by police be interviewed about their experiences.

Cole said in his video that he coincidentally was to meet with the civil liberties association about the issue of carding on his visit to Vancouver. He was also in Vancouver on the invitation of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to speak about the struggle for racial equity.

The incident involving Cole was raised by Coun. Christine Boyle during a Vancouver council meeting last week. She wanted council to make “a statement” in relation to the incident and show support for bias-free policing in Vancouver.

After some discussion, Boyle said she would bring forward a motion at a future meeting. This way, she told the Courier, it would not be “just on a whim in the moment of my own frustration and passion about the issue, but in a way that allows us to do it well and have a good and well informed discussion.”

Two of her council colleagues are married to Vancouver police officers.

As for the department’s report that concluded street checks are not discriminatory, Boyle said:

“It’s a challenge that any one instance might not be, or appear to be racially biased, but when the numbers show a trend, we should be asking why that trend exists, and how we can challenge it. And so the hope is that’s what the [independent] investigation is doing rather than treating each individual incident as unrelated to the next one.”

Cole, meanwhile, ended his Facebook post saying the media has chosen to focus on him and pit his word against the police, “as if the centuries-old police brutality against Indigenous and black peoples is new or misunderstood. Nah. The system isn’t broken, it was designed to exploit us, not only in policing but at school, in the child welfare system, at work, on public transit, in prisons, everywhere across Canada.”

mhowell@vancourier.com

@Howellings