Toronto Mayor John Tory says his ideal solution to the ongoing concern about police use of historic carding data would be to erase it, but a retinue of lawyers have told him that just can’t happen.

Speaking to reporters after participating in an anti-black racism forum at City Hall, Tory said he heard from numerous parents of young black men and women who fear the data from the now-abandoned practice will haunt them as they grow up.

“They don’t want there to be any chance whatsoever that an arbitrary encounter between the police and a young black person on the streets of Toronto with no suggestion to say they ever did anything wrong could lead to that piece information becoming known to say, a prospective employer,” Tory said.

In 2015, the Toronto police defined carding as “non-detention, non-arrest interactions between the Service and community members that involve the eliciting and/or recording of personal information,” from individuals who were not subject to a search warrant or the suspicion of committing a crime.

Reviewing the number of interactions between police and the public in recent years, the Ontario Human Rights Commission and several news outlets found that black and brown skinned young men were grossly-overrepresented in the data.

So in meetings of the Police Services Board, Tory said he’d asked for the data to be deleted.

“But we were told by not one, not two, but three sets of lawyers that would be against the law. It would be ridiculous to have a police services board of all groups to tell (police) to do something that is against the law.”

In Nov. 2016, Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack told CP24 the union was instructing officers not to engage in carding, as provincial rules regulating the practice were to kick in on Jan. 1, 2017.

But a day after McCormack’s decree, the Police Services Board passed a new rule which allowed police to retain all carding data, and also allowed officers and the broader law enforcement community to access the information so long as they receive personal approval from Chief Mark Saunders.

Saunders’ decisions on whether to grant access to the data are reviewed by a three-person panel, and the decisions will be released to the public on a quarterly basis.

Tory says the first quarterly report will be released soon.

“We can take another look perhaps with more lawyers but we must await the first report,” Tory said.