A conversation with human rights lawyer Prasanna Ranganathan.

By Kylie Adair

Prasanna Ranganathan has had the kind of career that anyone who’s considered law school has dreamt about. He’s a human rights lawyer with years of anti-discrimination, disability rights and international judicial reform work under his belt. He’s worked in Canada, Ethiopia, Jamaica and Mexico. He’s spoken to national audiences about the importance of diversity and inclusion. He’s been a part of structural and ground level changes that improve people’s lives around the world.

Most recently, he and a team under Justice Michael Tulloch, submitted the Report of the Independent Street Checks Review, which examined and made recommendations around the practice of random street checks, also known as carding, in Ontario.

According to the report, carding is a police practice in which an officer randomly asks an individual for identification when there is no suspicious activity, the person is not suspected of a crime, and there is no reason to believe the person has any information on any crime. Street checks, meanwhile, refer to identifying information obtained by a police officer outside of a police station that is not part of an investigation. Carding (or random street checks) is a subset of street checks. Proponents of the practice argue that it deters crime and is useful for intelligence gathering, as a way to create databases of information should a crime be committed in a particular neighbourhood. But who gets stopped and why—and whether the random street checks are based on race, socio-economic status or other identifiers—is a major problem. A 2017 regulation brought in by the Ontario Liberals put limitations on the practice, namely that officers were to inform those they stopped that participating in the check was voluntary. After a year in effect, Justice Tulloch was asked to assemble a team, which included Ranganathan, to review the regulation.

They ultimately found that the costs of random street checks or carding —”the negative effects on the physical and mental health of those carded; potential negative impacts on their employment and other opportunities; the loss of public trust and cooperation; and a reduction in the perception of police legitimacy”— outweigh whatever benefits there are. For that reason, Justice Tulloch and his team recommended the government ban carding or random street checks altogether. Ranganathan’s work on the review involved meeting thousands of people, including members of racialized communities who had been carded, to hear their stories and help determine a path forward.

*This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Kylie Adair is the editorial director at kaur. space. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and human rights and a miniature schnauzer named Dot.