A class-action lawsuit has been launched over the now-outlawed and racially skewed Toronto police practice of stopping, questioning and documenting people in non-criminal encounters, also known as “carding.”
While the practice was abandoned in Toronto in 2015 amid intense controversy and has since been reigned in across Ontario, with the introduction of clearer rules around what are also known as “street checks,” Ayaan Farah is an example of how data collected in the past continues to disproportionately haunt racialized Torontonians.
Farah, a 38-year-old Black woman and representative plaintiff in the lawsuit, temporarily lost her job as a worker at Pearson International Airport because of information collected by Toronto police in a 2011 encounter. That information ended up in the hands of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and resulted in the removal of her security clearance.
