carding

The illegal practice of using stolen credit card information to get mail order goods via phone, catalog, or the internet. It involves getting someone's credit card number, and using it to place a fraudulent order and send it to a drop site.

Also a term used when a store, drinking establishment or nightclub requires that one presents one's ID prior to purchase or entrance into the establishment. People are usually carded prior to being allowed to buy alcohol or cigarettes, so that the store's proprietor can be certain that the customer is of legal age to purchase such items. People are also occasionally carded by unusually dilligent shopkeepers when they attempt to pay for their purchases with a check or a credit card.

Carding, a.k.a. “street check,” a now-suspended process by which on-duty Toronto police officers could stop any and question any citizen, without cause, and record basic data including skin color on a "Field Information Report" form. Anyone so documented is then permanently “known to police” during any future name check, even if they have never been detained, arrested, or charged.

Although police officials disagree, carding is generally felt by the public and the press to disproportionately target black youth. A Toronto Star analysis of police data obtained via a freedom of information request shows that:

While blacks make up 8.3 per cent of Toronto’s population, they accounted for 25 per cent of the cards filled out between 2008 and mid-2011. In each of the city’s 72 patrol zones, blacks are more likely than whites to be stopped and carded. The likelihood increases in areas that are predominantly white.

Toronto Police Service suspended carding in January 2015. The Toronto Sun, the city’s conservative-slanted paper, reported in February 2016 that shootings and stabbings had increased dramatically since the process was suspended. The Sun directly blamed that increase on the suspension of street checks, claiming that no other explanation made sense.

In March 2016, the Ontario provincial government announced regulations to safeguard people’s rights. The new rules effectively ban carding without cause. Police can still stop and question people, but can’t put them in the database without consent. Carding data can still be legally collected during traffic stops or other official police interactions (arrests, executing warrants). Civil rights activists claimed that the regulations were too soft, and the police complained that the rules were cumbersome and subjective. The regulations take effect on January 1, 2017, giving time for police forces to be trained on the new procedures.

BQ'16 296 words (not including references)

References:

• Known to Police series, Toronto Star
• Known to police: Toronto police stop and document black and brown people far more than whites by Jim Rankin and Patty Winsa, Toronto Star
• Shootings up since carding suspended by Joe Warmington, Toronto Sun
• Ontario regulation bans random carding by police by Canadian Press, reported by CBC news
• Ontario spells out how cops can approach public by Antonella Artuso, Toronto Sun Queen's Park Bureau Chief
• An Overview of the Field Information Report Review and the Implementation of Community Inquiry Reports (306s) & Community Inquiry Report Receipts (307s), Toronto Police report (reviewed but not quoted here).

Card"ing (?), a.

1.

The act or process of preparing staple for spinning, etc., by carding it. See the Note under Card, v. t.

2.

A roll of wool or other fiber as it comes from the carding machine.

Carding engine, Carding machine, a machine for carding cotton, wool, or other fiber, by subjecting it to the action of cylinders, or drum covered with wire-toothed cards, revolving nearly in contact with each other, at different rates of speed, or in opposite directions, The staple issues in soft sheets, or in slender rolls called slivers.

© Webster 1913.