Profiled

When it happened to LOML and I, we thought it was funny. It happened when we were driving along Eglinton Avenue in Mississauga. A police cruiser pulled up behind us. The officer hit the flashing lights and whooped the siren a couple of times. Uh oh and a giggle or two. Were we driving over the limit? Easy enough to do in our car, but nope. Maybe our window tint was too dark. It really isn’t too dark, but who knows, in a different municipality. Maybe something fell off the bottom of the car. We pulled over. We weren’t really nervous. More curious than anything else. Cars started to slow down to catch a glimpse of the action. We got the ID out as the officer was doing his computer check. Finally, he made his way to the driver’s window. The look on his face was almost priceless. If I had to guess, I’d say he was surprised to see a couple of senior citizens staring back at him. He mumbled something about being sorry, he might have input our licence number incorrectly and something about mud on the back plate. He looked as if he was about to burst out laughing as he offered more apologies for pulling us over. No, he didn’t want to see our identification, hoped we would forgive his mistake and told us have a lovely evening. He didn’t even ask us if we’d been drinking.

Before our windows were powered up, before the officer was back in his cruiser and before we had a moment to think about what had happened, we started laughing. We’d been profiled. We drive a sleek, black coupe with tinted windows and a dangerously peppy engine. Profiled. We’d been flashed and hooted over to the side of a busy street because of what our car looked like and who we might have been. A couple of elderly drug dealers. Profiled because of the car. Once the cruiser passed us, we pulled into the little strip mall —our original destination—went to the liquor store, bought a bottle of bourbon and headed back to the hotel. Laughing all the way—as the song goes.

But now that I’ve had a few months to think about being profiled, I wonder, “What if LOML and I hadn’t been white, senior citizens?” What would have happened if we’d been a lot younger and not caucasian? Maybe with a piercing and a tattoo or two. What if we’d been wearing ball caps instead of Tilley hats? How would that have changed the outcome of the profiling event? I shudder when I think of what could have happened at the side of Eglinton Avenue in Mississauga that spring evening. A news story last week about Frantz St. Fleur’s incident with the Scotia- Bank reminds me how different life would be if we looked more like St. Fleur and less like us.

By way of a refresher, this past April, St. Fleur was attempting to deposit a $9,000 cheque to one of his ScotiaBank accounts. The cheque represented his refunded deposit from a condominium purchase which hadn’t worked out. The cheque was issued by Re/Max and, for the record, Mr. St. Fleur had been a customer of that particular branch of ScotiaBank for close to 10 years. Sounds simple enough. But it wasn’t St. Fleur’s day. He was escorted into an office, by a bank clerk, offered information about investment products for his refunded $9,000. That bank clerk told St. Fleur it was a lot of money to leave in a regular account, it would be better in an investment account. St. Fleur had investments with ScotiaBank and had withdrawn funds from his Scotia- Bank TFSA for the deposit. But Mr. St. Fleur was in a rush. He was on his way to work, and told the clerk he didn’t have time to look into investments. He just wanted to deposit the cheque for the time being. Mr. St. Fleur didn’t have the pleasure of the flashing lights and a whoop of the siren to warn him of the officers moving in on him where he sat waiting for his transaction to be completed. The police officers didn’t look at Mr. St. Fleur and think, “Oops, he couldn’t be a crook. Someone, obviously, made a mistake. This guy would never do anything fraudulent.” Nope. St. Fleur was swiftly restrained, read his rights, arrested and taken to the 43rd Division Station in Toronto, where he was told the charge was trying to cash a bogus cheque. Nobody snickered. Nobody apologized. Mr. St. Fleur isn’t a white senior citizen.

Profiled. Yep, we were, and we were lucky enough to have been able to laugh about it at that moment. Little did we know, we were just a bit of geographic ancestry away from an evening behind bars. Scary thing, profiling. Yet we all do it. Go figure.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca