The Star: Police Strip Searches On The Rise

As reported in today's Toronto Star, "Toronto police strip searched roughly 60 per cent of the people they arrested in 2010, compared to 32 per cent 10 years ago, according to police statistics."

Given recent high profile incidents of this practice, some have suggested that the authorities are using the searches as a tool of intimidation and humiliation, yet another indication of a creeping authoritarianism insinuating itself into our social fabric.

But there may be another explanation. Given the high profile evidence of faltering police facial-recognition skills, and since we all come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and endowments, perhaps they are merely employing an adaptive strategy to more definitively and completely identify us for future reference, whether that be in a court of law or elsewhere.

Tracy Bonds

I just finished watching video obtained by The Ottawa Citizen showing the manhandling of Tracy Bonds, the 27-year-old woman arrested in 2008 for 'public intoxication.' According to police, they stopped her for having an open bottle of alcohol, although that bottle has never been produced. After running her name through the computer and finding nothing, they told her to keep walking home. When Ms. Bonds, a black woman who perhaps suspected racial profiling, asked why she had been stopped in the first place, they arrested her for public intoxication.

The videotapes given to The Ottawa Citizen speak for themselves, showing her being physically abused by the booking officers at the station, and speak volumes about the way Canadians can be treated when they dare to question the powers that be.

While watching the videos, I couldn't help but think of the myriad instances of police abusing their powers during this past summer's G20 summit, and the fact that despite the plethora of evidence of police wrong-doing, the SIU recently concluded that there was no way to charge the offending officers, as they refused, as is their right, to speak to the SIU. In ways I don't understand, invoking their rights somehow has given them immunity from any prosecution.

Dalton McGuinty, while he stayed strangely silent and was, in my view, complicit in the G20 Charter rights violations, has ventured forth to comment on the Tracy Bonds case. Perhaps recognizing a political opportunity, he is on record as saying:

“I think I would ask . . . our police to remember (that) this is somebody’s daughter, this is somebody’s sister. For all they know this might have been somebody’s mother,” McGuinty said.

The Premier acknowledged that an incident like this “shakes our confidence” in police and added it is incumbent upon the provincial Attorney General’s office to review the case, including the conduct of the crown attorney in the case.

A shame he was hardly as forthright about the massive police wrongdoing at the Toronto Summit.