A report from the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition contains a fairly serious allegation based on the Toronto Police Services' own numbers, released to the Police Services Board. Apparently, of the approximately 50,000 arrests the police are expected to have made last year (the official numbers aren't out yet) the police conducted Level 3 searches (police terminology for a strip search; Level 4 is a cavity search) on more than 30,000 occasions.

So if TPAC, the activist group led by former mayor John Sewell, is right, strip searches are being used roughly 60 percent of the time in Toronto. Sewell argues the rate makes it a routine procedure (which is hard to contest: it's more common than, say, getting wanded at the airport) and thus violates the rules from the Supreme Court on when strip searches can be used. The Supreme Court says that strip searches "cannot be carried out simply as a matter of routine policy", because "strip searches are inherently humiliating and degrading for detainees."

In two-thirds of Level 3 searches, nothing was found, which raises the question of why exactly so many are being searched in the first place. What reason did the police have for a strip search that a less-invasive ("humiliating and degrading", to use the Supreme Court's words) search wouldn't have sufficed?

According to the TPAC newsletter, when asked whether more than half of arrests would constitute a routine use of Level 3 searches, Police Chief Bill Blair said that for something to be routine it would have to occur something like 100 percent of the time (something like handcuffs and fingerprinting would qualify). It's not exactly a reassuring answer, and even less reassuring than the Chief's assertion that the perceived climb in strip searches is due entirely to better record-keeping. According to the Toronto Star, the police started keeping better records after a 2005 complaint by, you guessed it, John Sewell. So, before 2005, there were tons of undocumented strip searches despite the 2001 Supreme Court case? Yikes.

Blog photo by *grainger* via Flickr.