Madu has introduced Bill 63, the Police (Street Checks and Carding) Amendment Act, 2021. The bill purports to "formalizes the ban on carding and guide[] how street checks are done." As with the policy it codifies, the bill is a bait and switch.
Banning carding while allowing street checks to continue, especially for what is called "crime prevention activities", makes zero sense.
Here are the definitions of carding and street checks in the government's news release. See if you can tell the difference between both. I'll start with carding: "when officers randomly request personal information from a member of the public without reasonable grounds."
Street checks refer to interactions or observations that result in an officer collecting personal and/or identifying information and entering it into a database for future use as per [enumerated] activities" including "crime prevention activities".
What both things have in common is that a police officer is stopping a person who has not committed a crime and in some cases, not even suspected of having committed one. Crime prevention activities are so vague as to encompass a ton of police shenanigans.
Street checks disproportionately target racialized persons. And once your personal information is collected and entered into a database, the police then has legitimate reason to harass you.
If the Minister really wants to make policing safer for racialized persons, ban both. Giving with one hand and taking back with another is not progress.
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