A troubling new report from London police shows the number of use-of-force arrests involving a subject with a firearm nearly doubled in 2018.

Retired police chief Murray Faulkner says one of the reasons police are coming across more guns during what they call threshold incidents, or use-of-force arrests, is because the practice of carding has all but ended.

He believes less personal interaction by police means more guns in the hands of criminals.

“Gun crime is on the increase and stopping proactively people at two, three, four in the morning has gone down dramatically.”

According to a report from the London Police Service, the number of use-of-force incidents involving subjects with a pistol, rifle or shotgun nearly doubled in 2018 from the previous year, going from eight per cent to 15 per cent.

Faulkner says in part it's because Toronto’s gun problem is migrating westward, but also because police officers no longer conduct random street checks.

“Those that are up to no good at two or three or four in the morning now know that police aren't going to stop them like they used to. The side effect to all that is the violence we see play out not only in Toronto but in the number of guns taken off the street in our own city.”

Carding became one of the most controversial practices involving London police over the last few years, but the practice has virtually disappeared, with police conducting such street checks only twice in 2018.

The province tightened the rules on carding in 2017, but the London Police Services Board went a step further, with local officers now informing individuals at the beginning of an interaction that they can just walk away.

Officers also cannot request identification for general intelligence gathering and information is destroyed after five years.

Faulkner says, “We have to get back to proactive policing that's non-discriminatory...That our front line police officers are trained to articulate the reasons why…And I think the pendulum will be able to swing back and make the streets safer.”

The 2018 use-of-force report goes to the Police Services Board Thursday.