Newsstand: October 9, 2015

In the news today: Peel police, a raw milk farmer facing "joke" charges, and racial profiling.

By Tannara Yelland • Illustration by Matthew Daley

Peel police are overwhelmingly white (87 per cent) while they serve a region whose population is 60 per cent non-white, according to recently released data. Peel regional police have, like Toronto city police and forces in some other regions in the country, come under fire for the practice of carding and for the frequent racial bias in how carding is administered. In Peel, black people are three times as likely as white people to be carded, meaning they are three times as likely to be stopped and questioned while under no suspicion of committing a crime, and that their information is likely stored in a police database. Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie has faced pushback from Peel police after insisting they suspend the practice of carding until further work can be done to ensure it is both actually helpful and not racially targeted.

Michael Schmidt, an Ontario man who oversees a farming collective that produces raw milk for its members’ consumption, has been charged with theft related to two police cameras that he called police about. Schmidt says he saw two cameras on the side of the road, unattached to anything, and called police to ask whose they might be. He maintains friends and neighbours took the cameras down, and called the charges and summons to court “a joke” because they came so close on the heels of an Ontario government raid of his farm, in which officials from the ministries of agriculture, natural resources, and finance attempted to seize his equipment. The farming collective gathered together and had the ministries leave. Raw or unprocessed milk poses a threat to human health, according to the Ontario government, and is banned for sale. But farmers are allowed to drink the milk produced by their own cows.

Mary McCarthy has won a rare victory in the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario: the charges she brought there of being racially profiled in a Shoppers Drug Mart in 2010 were upheld, and the store has been told to pay her $8,000. McCarthy was accused of shoplifting and treated rudely even after she relented and allowed an employee to look in her bag, finding nothing. The employee in question was caught in a number of lies, including the claim that she hadn’t noticed McCarthy was black.