Toronto spends less on police than average and it's the safest city in Canada. It's odd that police won't take credit for their efficiency
Every now and again, the fever swamps of partisan politics and activism cough out a political advertisement that so oversteps the mark of decency and reason it almost takes your breath away. The 1993 Kim Campbell campaign’s portrayal of Jean Chrétien as some kind of malevolent gargoyle is perhaps the most famous Canadian example, but the 2006 Paul Martin campaign’s warning that Stephen Harper would deploy “soldiers with guns” into our cities is at least a close second.
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The 1964 Lyndon Johnson campaign’s famous “Daisy Girl” ad was widely considered over the top at the time: A little girl counting daisy petals without a care in the world gets vaporized by an atomic blast, presumably precipitated by GOP candidate Barry Goldwater’s foreign-policy recklessness. But it was, after all, the Cold War. When Greenpeace copied it 40 years later, showing a jumbo jet descending over a family frolicking wholesomely on a beach and crashing into a nuclear power plant, pretty much everyone gasped in unison.
That was at least amusingly over the top, mind you (as was Martin’s). The Toronto Police Association (read: union) has been dipping its toe in these waters recently as it attempts to frighten citizens into demanding a significant budget hike for the force. And it’s not amusing at all. It’s intolerable.
One advertisement, posted on social media, invites us to imagine the horror of a child being abducted by a stranger. “I can’t see her! Where is she? I don’t know where she is!” a woman wails down the line to a 911 operator.
“Keep calm, we can be there in 22 minutes,” the operator assures her — 22 minutes being the Toronto Police Force’s average reported response time for a “priority” 911 call in 2023.
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Another advertisement introduces us to a terrified woman hiding in a closet from a home-invader. “Please help me!” she pleads in a whisper.
The 911 operator begs for any officers available to attend the scene but receives no reply whatsoever.
This is rank fearmongering. It neither serves nor protects anyone.
In 2022, 19 children nationwide were reported abducted by strangers, two of them in Ontario. This is not a rational thing for Canadian parents to worry about. Indeed, many years removed from the “stranger danger” panic, I think most Canadian parents understand that children as a group are considerably more at risk from dodgy spouses, relatives or other acquaintances than they are from strangers. And it’s still a very small risk.
The Toronto Police Service reported 3,911 residential break-and-enters in 2023, which is up nearly 40 per cent from 2021. But it’s also down nearly 20 per cent since 2019, and lower than any year since 2014. That’s a year Torontonians tend to think back on as the good old days, from the perspective of a sudden, rapid, unmistakeable and too-often violent deterioration in the city’s basic functioning since then.
The Toronto Police — union and Chief Myron Demkiw alike — want you to know that that Toronto spends 40-per-cent less than the average Canadian city on policing per capita. Some might suggest that’s appropriate, considering how much safer Toronto is than most other Canadian cities.
Indeed, if public safety is as correlated to police spending as the Toronto police suggest, one might call it a triumph of efficient law enforcement. In 2022 Toronto’s reported violent crime rate was 878 per 100,000 population, the lowest of any significant-sized city in the country.
Compare that figure to 1,645 per 100,000 in Winnipeg, 1,878 in Kelowna, B.C., 2,042 in Lethbridge, Alta., and 2,071 in Thunder Bay, Ont. The Toronto Police Service helped keep the numbers relatively low despite budget increases of zero per cent, and even a slight cut, in three of the past seven years. How odd that they seem so reluctant to claim credit!
All that said, 22 minutes is clearly an unacceptable response time for emergency calls. Thirteen minutes, as it was in 2010, strikes me as unacceptable as well. Concerned as I am for public safety in Toronto, I could see myself supporting a budget increase for the cops, to make the city even safer — as it should be. But not on these terms. Not when police brass constantly thumb their noses at those they serve.
This is a police service that wants us to believe its horses, and the “Horse Palace” in which they live, are utterly essential to public safety, and that in order to provide this service the horses must crap all over the street. (Chicago’s police horses, among others, wear horsey diapers.)
“The difference between dogs and horses is that dogs eat meat and horses do not eat meat,” a mounted officer memorably told CBC News in 2011. “Within two to three days manure will just dry out and blow away, very similar to clippings of grass.”
Literal horse sh-t.
This is a police service that only recently shut down the semi-secret bar it had been running at headquarters, after Riyaz Hussein, then head of the force’s disciplinary unit, enjoyed himself a bit too much and got into an accident on Highway 401. He was demoted for 12 months — astonishingly harsh by insanely lax police-discipline standards. Even a gesture at genuine accountability for officers’ malfeasance might go a long way to restoring the “protect and serve” brand.
Lots of special-interest groups predict the end of civilization should their worldview not be implemented in full. The police aren’t special in that regard. The problem is that police shouldn’t be a special-interest group. They’re not an ethnic or religious or other minority group. They’re civil servants — unusually essential civil servants, but civil servants nonetheless. They work for us, on our terms. And they cannot possibly claim to be experts on law and order while publishing Criminal Minds-style horror fiction on their social media accounts.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
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