An ongoing dispute between a Carleton criminal justice professor and the Ottawa Police Service has raised concerns about regulations surrounding police “carding.”
Darryl Davies recently wrote a letter to Ottawa Police Services Board after one of his fourth-year students, Andrew Tysowski had an incident with the police.
Carding, also known as a street check, is when police collect information from citizens and store it in a data base, according to Davies.
Even though innocent of any crime, Tysowski had information stored on him in the data base from six years ago, said Davies.
“Intelligence gathering takes place when they are investigating crimes, they cannot gather intelligence for the sake of gathering intelligence, there has to be a purpose for it,” Davies said. “There should be clearly set out objectives with respect to what they are doing.”
Where that data is going, how long that data is being held in the database, who has access to your personal information, and in what ways that information may be used against you in the future are all important issues that need to be addressed, said Harrison Smith, a PhD student who specializes in digital surveillance at University of Toronto’s faculty of information studies.
“Is it really necessary for the police to ‘swipe’ your ID into a database if you’re being stopped routinely?” Smith asked.
Davies is not opposed to Ottawa police doing street checks and collecting information, but said it must be done within a legally described process under law, not something they just do on their own.
“[I]t’s shameful that the Ottawa Police Service and OC Transpo are arbitrarily collecting personal data/information on contact with Ottawa citizens who are neither charged nor convicted of an offence under the Criminal Code of Canada or the Highway Traffic Act” Davies wrote in his letter to the Ottawa Police Services Board.
In response to Davies’ claim, Tyrus Cameron, acting deputy chief of Ottawa Police, said all information gathered is done within the law.
“A street check is intelligence for our detectives to narrow down cases. We keep it within the law, we collect it within the law and we use it for lawful purposes,” Cameron said.
“If people are innocent, then they are cleared. If there is wrongful information kept on them they can apply under the municipal freedom [of information] and [protection of] privacy act and they can see what records the police have,” Cameron said.
The Ottawa police board should develop policy to ensure what the police do is governed by a legal framework, not by the individual decision of one officer, said Davies, whose main concern is that information is being stored on innocent people.
“There should be clearly set out objectives with respect to what they are doing,” Davies said.
