Peel Regional Police Chief Jennifer Evans under fire for refusal to end carding

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She started as a 19-year-old cadet with Peel Regional Police and grew up in the force. But, by her own account, the most important moments in the education of Chief Jennifer Evans happened during her work outside the force – at inquiries into why police failed to stop Canada's most notorious serial killers. Asked to examine the cases of Robert Pickton and Paul Bernardo, Chief Evans concluded that communication failures allowed both men to continue to target women.

Yet today, the 53-year-old chief finds herself under fire for the very thing she learned to value most: the collection and sharing of information. She says her ability to listen is a point of pride, but her critics say she doesn't hear them.

The conflict can be traced to the racially charged issue of carding. The Peel force has called the practice "street checks" or "street interviews" since it officially began in 1993. Now it is simply the "collection of identifying information." The civilian board that oversees the force – the chief's boss – passed a motion last year asking her to suspend the practice, no matter what it's called. She told the board no.

Chief Evans, one of just a handful of female police leaders in Canada, says she was hired for her decision-making ability. And, though her $289,000-a-year contract is up for renewal next October, she is not one for backing down.

The dispute over carding has sparked a wider debate over whether the Peel force is in step with the times and the community it serves. The country's third-largest municipal force has had to examine its own demographics – four out of five officers are white, though Peel Region, which comprises the town of Caledon and the cities of Brampton and Mississauga, is the country's most multiracial (57 per cent are minorities) – and account for a reputation for violating people's rights. Chief Evans is feeling the heat from the police board, the mayors in her region and community groups who question whether she is standing in the way of change.

In her uniform, Chief Evans is a formidable presence, but one lightened by a quick, engaging sense of humour. In an interview in the boardroom of Peel's 22 Division in Brampton, she is not the stern figure seen at meetings of the police services board. Asked to sit on a ledge for a photo, she remarks on her familiarity with ledges – a reference to where her career stands at the moment.

There is little in policing that she hasn't done. She has been a beat cop, a staff sergeant in charge of uniformed officers, an inspector in charge of the homicide bureau. In senior posts she oversaw records management, uniformed divisions and intelligence. Today she chairs an Ontario government advisory group on the future of policing. She says she was never treated differently because she is a woman.

"I think there were always opportunities," she says.

She joined Ontario judge Archie Campbell's review of policing failures in the Paul Bernardo investigation in the mid-1990s. Chief Evans interviewed every one of Bernardo's surviving sex-assault victims – more than a dozen in all.

"It was disturbing, but it was such an opportunity for me to learn how to be a better police officer," she says.

It taught her that officers sometimes shut down witnesses if they don't pay attention or if they make inappropriate comments. "A lot of the women made disclosures to me that had never been disclosed during the investigations. I think it was because I was listening."

In 2010 she joined the inquiry led by Wally Oppal, a former judge and attorney-general, into the calamitous policing failures that led Robert Pickton of Port Coquitlam, B.C., to become Canada's worst serial killer. Then Peel's deputy chief, she had the chance to interview several police chiefs and assistant commissioners of the RCMP. She also reviewed the files on 49 disappeared women and wrote a report on what had gone wrong in the Pickton investigation. "Senior management weren't paying attention to the investigators," she says.

Now some residents and community groups say she has not been paying attention to her own officers.

If carding means random, arbitrary and often race-based stops, Peel Regional Police have never carded anyone, according to Chief Evans. They act only in suspicious circumstances – for instance, if a stranger is sitting on someone's driveway at three in the morning.

But lawyer Christien Levien, who is black, says he was stopped by Peel police a decade ago while waiting for a bus at the intersection of Airport Road and Steeles Avenue and asked to see his ID. He was 19, a first-year public-policy student at York University.

"I asked them why," he recalls. "I was immediately tackled to the ground. I was searched. I was put inside a police vehicle. … And I was not given any real reason as to why they did that." They quickly let him go. He complained through Peel's police complaints process, and one of the officers was reprimanded.

Based in Brampton, Mr. Levien, now 29, holds regular workshops for young black men, teaching them what their rights are when stopped by police.

To be black in Peel, he says, is to be "constantly living under suspicion by police." He says he knows of young men stopped when heading out from home and again on their way back. "They don't feel that they can trust police, and as a result, it makes them unwilling to speak with police."

Data supplied by the police board appear to bear out Mr. Levien's assertions. Of the 90,717 street checks between 2009 and 2014, 20 per cent involved black people, who make up just 9 per cent of the population, and 27 per cent involved white people, who make up 43 per cent of the community. (For 22 per cent, no race was documented.)

Against this backdrop, Chief Evans released a survey last month showing a 93-per-cent satisfaction rate among Peel residents with their police force.

Ranjit Khatkur, chair of the Peel Coalition Against Racialized Discrimination (P-CARD), calls the survey "bs." She also doesn't mince words about Chief Evans. "She needs to go. She really doesn't listen. She has no sense of what the reality is."

Peel Region was a bedroom community among farm fields when Chief Evans joined the force in 1984. As it shed the farms, the sprawling middle-class neighbourhoods of Mississauga and Brampton to the west and northwest of Toronto became a magnet for immigrants. But its rough-and-ready police culture was already set, its critics say. Among some criminal lawyers, Peel police have a reputation for being poorly supervised and confrontational with minorities.

"Anecdotally, the Peel force has been viewed as acting lawlessly for pretty much the 25 years I've been practising," said criminal defence lawyer Peter Bawden.

Experienced judges have gone out of their way to send a message about rights violations by Peel police. Ontario Superior Court Justice Casey Hill, who sits in Brampton, established a major precedent in 2013: When judges assess the seriousness of a Charter violation (such as a vehicle search without justification), they can consider previous violations by the individual or force before deciding whether to throw out the evidence. That's a gigantic leap because, previously in Ontario, police started each case with a blank slate.

"There has been a disturbing pattern of Charter abuse in vehicle stops in Peel," Ontario Superior Court Justice Bruce Durno said later that year as he threw out illegally obtained gun evidence.

Chief Evans, who became chief in October, 2012, got the message. She paid a visit to the-then regional senior judge of the Ontario Court of Justice, Kathryn Hawke. "I made an arrangement to go to see her," Chief Evans says. "I think it's important to have these conversations, to say, 'Hey, if there's concerns or questions that are coming out, then I would like to address them.'"

But another private meeting Chief Evans allegedly held – in a hospital room, after a woman was accidentally shot by police in her kitchen – is in the spotlight. A Brampton woman, Suzan Zreik, filed a $21-million lawsuit this month against Chief Evans, the police board and the individual officers. She alleges Chief Evans visited her in the hours after the shooting last March, promising to help her in a policing career – Ms. Zreik was a police foundations student – before the province's Special Investigations Unit had probed the shooting. She also alleges Chief Evans violated her rights by having Peel officers detain and interrogate her while she was suffering from the gunshot injury.

"I think it was to try to create a specific narrative, a blameless narrative, at the outset," said her lawyer, Michael Moon.

The SIU investigated the shooting, in which Ms. Zreik's neighbour, a 22-year-old man with a knife, was killed, and said it was legally justifiable. In a statement to The Globe and Mail, Chief Evans called Ms. Zreik's allegations without merit, adding, "We are restricted from discussing the evidence, which makes it difficult to get an accurate picture of what occurred."

Is Chief Evans the individual to "modernize" the Peel force, the word used by police services board chair Amrik Ahluwalia and Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie?

Mr. Oppal said he was deeply impressed by Chief Evans's professionalism during his inquiry. "She believed police ought to be accountable for what they do," he said. "She objectively and with an independent mind looked at the police failures and was very candid in her assessment. She was remarkable in what she did."

But candid assessments of the Peel police and their chief are few, outside of the defence bar and judiciary. The Crown prosecutor's office in Peel was known until recently as "no deal Peel" (even Chief Evans, unprompted, mentioned the nickname), and some criminal defence lawyers say the Crown's hardline attitude meant one less check on police power. (Peel Crown attorney David Maylor declined to be interviewed for this story.) And the police board was known for its unquestioned support of its police chiefs. The attitude, said Ms. Crombie, a board member, was "heads down, hands up."

In September, 2015, the board, in a 4-3 vote, asked the chief to suspend carding. Both Ms. Crombie and Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey voted with the majority. Still, the chief refused.

"I am trying to ensure I am protecting the rights and safety of everyone – 1.3 million people in my community," Chief Evans says.

Ms. Crombie was stunned.

"I felt strongly that we were stepping on people's human rights and freedoms," she said. "The street checks were targeting particular demographics — largely the black community."

Since then, acrimony has flared between the police board, the chief and the department. In June, P-CARD demanded an equity audit of the force's hiring and promotion practices. Later, Ms. Crombie proposed an equity audit, and her motion passed. Chief Evans sent an angry letter of complaint to Mr. Ahluwalia, saying he had failed to halt a "disrespectful tirade" from P-CARD.

In April, the Peel police services board and Chief Evans became the first to adopt Ontario government regulations limiting how and when street checks may be done. But that doesn't mean the carding debate has ended in Peel; Ms. Crombie says it is unclear how the new policy will work out in practice.

Chief Evans remains steadfast.

"I think there's such a misrepresentation of what police in Peel have been doing," she says of the street checks. "I would hate to think people are going to define me in my long career [by street checks] – I have worked so hard in support of community safety and the prevention of victims. I will continue to do that. I will continue to make decisions that I think are right for my community."