Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity (Toronto)

"NEPV has been very clear in its position carding must go! We see nothing of value in a tool that pre-criminalizes our communities, targeting and harassing people who are not criminal suspects. Intruding into our communities and forcefully gathering random information on residents should be seen as what it really is: an occupation force spying on innocent civilians. We should not assist the police or the regime at Queen’s Park in designing the terms of the occupation of our communities and the regulation of our physical movement."

"We call on all concerned organizations and individuals to actively resist efforts at masking the abhorrent process of carding. Instead of sitting down to discuss how to reform these illegal, highly intrusive and completely discriminatory practices, NEPV supports calls to end the victimization of racialized and working-class communities that are suffering from the violence of carding across Turtle Island or Canada. Let us get together and organize neighbourhood-based Free2Go campaigns to empower our neighbours to stop sharing their personal information with the cops. If we stop sharing our personal information in these non-criminal interactions with the police, carding will come to an end. Let's organize and not agonize over discriminatory policing tactics."

"The knee-jerk solution has been to recommend increasing security staff on the properties. Yet, heavy and continuous surveillance by Toronto police is not having an effect, so what effect will this attempt realistically have? TCH residents already face what may seem as an occupying army of police with whom residents have an uneasy relationship. They live with the anticipation and the trauma of their doors being broken down with battering rams in the early hours of the morning during regular police raids."

"But lawyer and civil liberties advocate Paul Champ said it's "shocking" how disproportionately blacks and Middle Eastern people are street-checked. In Ottawa, blacks account for 5% of the population but made up 20% of the people street-checked over the past five years. Middle Eastern people make up 3% of the population, but accounted for 14% of street checks. "What the Ottawa Police do is go into areas ... and they stop people -- usually from visible minority groups -- ask them who they are, where they are going, without these other suspicious factors," Champ said."