Project South arrests raise deeper questions

The Toronto Police Service is one of the oldest institutions in this country. In fact it’s 33 years older than the country itself.

And in all of those nearly two hundred years of history, you’d be hard-pressed to find a darker time for the force than right now.

That’s because last week, seven current and one former Toronto Police officers were arrested and charged with an absolute litany of offences — drug trafficking, theft, accepting bribes, illegal weapons possession, conspiracy to obstruct justice, fraud, breach of trust, harassment and, worst of all, conspiracy to commit murder.

And while we don’t have many details yet, the little we do know is certainly breathtaking. The investigation began after hitmen attempted to assassinate a corrections officer at his home last year. And many of these officers are alleged to have used the police database to facilitate shootings across the region, seemingly at the behest of an alleged drug trafficker Brian Da Costa.

During the press conference announcing the charges, the media were shown video after video of gunmen firing shots into cars and homes in suburban neighbourhoods.

In addition to murder and intimidation on behalf of a drug trafficker, many of these officers were allegedly dealing themselves, everything from cocaine to adderall to fentanyl, while also working with illegal cannabis stores dotted throughout the city.

And there already appears to be connections to the city’s infamous tow-truck industry, which has itself been responsible for an absurd number of shootings and murders over the last few years.

This is far from the first scandal of a similar variety that has plagued police forces in Ontario. The most obvious parallel is the so-called “Scherzer crew,” a rogue TPS drug squad that was alleged to have embarked on a four-year-long crime spree, robbing drug dealers throughout the city. More recently, cops from a variety of agencies have been charged with corruption in connection with all of that tow-truck crime.

But this latest set of allegation is at a level above anything else this city has ever seen. Conspiracy to commit murder? Of a corrections officer? That speaks to a level of brazenness that’s hard to comprehend.

But here’s the truth of the matter — none of this should be a surprise. This deep-rooted corruption is an inevitable consequence of how the TPS operates. For at least half-a-century, the Toronto Police have been masters of this city, subject to no authority other than their own.

We have allowed this police force to morph into a violent gang. It’s time they were finally brought to heel.

This case of corruption is only the latest symptom of an obviously sick institution. On the Toronto subreddit, one user named u/whatistheQuestion, compiles a rolling list of news stories about local police misconduct every year. It makes for desultory reading — police shootings, excessive force, robbing civilians, lying on the stand, professional incompetence, sexual assault, drunk driving and every other kind of bad behaviour under the sun.

There are around five thousand sworn officers in the service. And it’s truly hard to imagine a random sampling of five thousand city residents committing as many unethical and illegal actions on a regular basis.

And the irony is that most of those stories recount the kinds of incidents that are in the news one day and gone the next. Ask your average Torontonian, and they’re likely to mention an entirely separate set of major scandals — the G20 mass arrests; the killings of people in mental health crisis, like Sammy Yatim and Andrew Loku; the specious murder prosecution of Umar Zameer; the longtime use of carding against Black boys and men; sexual harassment of female officers within the department; the negligence of allowing a serial killer to run rampant in the city’s queer community; and much more.

At first glance, all of these controversies might seem to have little do with one another. But what unites all of these, as well as the most recent corruption scandal, is that they all share the same root cause — impunity. The cops simply aren’t accountable to anyone outside of themselves. Like other municipal police forces across the country, the TPS isn’t merely a public service provided by the city to its residents. It has morphed into a power centre of its own, the most influential and untouchable political entity in the city. This allows the police to ensure that the systems that are set up to hold them to account are defanged, allowing both individual officers and the force as a whole to do as they wish.

None of this is new. For five decades, the Toronto Police have fought against civilian control over the agency, one of the most hallowed principles of Canadian policing. And whenever anyone or anything tries to put a limit on their unbridled powers — whether it be a mayor, city council, the police board or everyday citizens — the cops have been willing to use whatever means necessary to get their way.

The Toronto Police have been at war with this city’s residents and its representatives. And it’s a war that they continue to win.

Fifty years ago, the Toronto Police were facing a similar crisis. In 1976, a royal commission report detailed the brutal and illegal methods employed by many officers. The arbitrary arrests. Random beatings. Routine lying. But what was especially distributing was the normalized use of sexual torture on suspects who would be stripped and abused with implements like the so-called “claw.”

Much of the public was incensed and reform was clearly in order. But the situation just got worse from there. In the late 1970s, the Toronto Police went on a killing spree. In the span of 13 months, they had shot eight men dead. That included Albert Johnson, a 35-year-old Jamaican-Canadian who had been complaining of police harassment for months before he was gunned down in his home. Two officers chased a clearly erratic Johnson into his home and killed him in his room.

Things devolved to a point that Gerald Carter, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Toronto, was openly proclaiming that “it was dangerous” for everyday people to even complain about police misconduct.

And then, in 1978, John Sewell, the leader of city council’s progressive wing, was elected mayor. And Sewell, to his great credit and his political detriment, did his best to take on the power of the Toronto police.

It’s not like Sewell was some kind of a radical on policing — he was an advocate of reform. He wanted the cops to stop harassing Toronto’s gay community and for city council to have an actual say in how the police budget was spent. For these sins, the Toronto Police took to routinely calling him gay slurs and tried to destroy his reputation in the press. The provincial government overruled him at every turn and Sewell was defeated in his re-election bid.

But it’s what happened next that’s really important to understand. Two months after Sewell was out of office, the Toronto Police initiated Operation Soap, a mass arrest of more than 300 gay men in various clubs and bathhouses throughout the city. The Bathhouse Raids were the largest mass arrest in Canadian history to the point, with the exception of the October Crisis.

Even at the time, this enormous violation of civil rights was correctly understood as a rebuke to Sewell — the cops were spitting in the face of a mayor who had dared stand up to the Toronto Police. And they were sending a message to anyone else who might try to do the same.

And ever since then, the Toronto Police have reigned supreme. Far more than our elected mayors or city councillors, it is the cops who have had final say in this city. And whenever anyone dared challenge them, they’ve gotten the Sewell treatment

In 1988, a man named Lester Donaldson was shot and killed by a Toronto Police officer in his home. It was an eerie repeat of Albert Johnson killing a decade earlier. And in response, a number of Black Torontonians created the Black Action Defence Committee, an activist organization aimed at holding the police to account. They were led by a man named Dudley Laws, a longtime police critic and one of the most compelling activists in the city’s history. And they were effective. They argued that it was a conflict-of-interest for the police to investigate its own officers when they killed someone on the job. And because of their advocacy, the province created a civilian review commission, the Special Investigations Unit, to take that power away from the police.

Once again, the Toronto Police could not abide by that kind of disrespect.

And so, as with police critics both before and after him, they sought to destroy Dudley Laws’s reputation. The cops targeted him as if he were a mafia boss, enlisting two other police forces and using 75 individual officers, all in an effort to try to find a crime they could pin on him. And they were successful. Laws, who worked as an immigration consultant, was charged with helping four people illegally cross the border. And while the charges were eventually stayed by the Crown and Laws was never convicted, the Toronto Police had accomplished their goal — they had defamed their most prominent critic and made him a criminal in the eyes of much of the public.

They were still left with the SIU, this new civilian agency. But that also proved to not be much of a problem. According to various reports written by the province’s ombudsman, SIU investigations almost never result in criminal charges. While the ombudsman’s office demonstrated that the agency itself often has a pro-police bias, they also showed that almost every part of the law enforcement apparatus — whether it be individual officers, the police services, the police unions and even the Ministry of the Attorney-General, actively work to cripple SIU.

An agency built to hold the police to account became an exoneration machine.

Another crucial way that the police are supposed to be held in check in this province is through direct civilian oversight. The police chiefs are hired and governed by the police services board, whose members are appointed jointly by the provincial and municipal governments. This is who the police chiefs are supposed to be directly accountable to. But as we’ve seen, the Toronto Police do not like accountability.

In 1991, Susan Eng, a prominent Toronto lawyer and police critic, was appointed chair the Toronto Police Service Board. She soon began to publicly clash with the chief. And so the cops did what they’d always done — they used their extraordinary powers to target their boss

The police put together a secret dossier on Eng, full of unfounded rumours that she was connected to East Asian gangsters. And they began to surveil her, having detectives follow her around and wiretapping conversations she would have with her friends.

The man who led the investigations into both Dudley Laws and Susan Eng, an up-and-coming detective named Julian Fantino, would go on to be appointed chief of the Toronto Police Service in 2000.

In the years that followed, other members of the Toronto Police board, invariably politicians who were critical of the cops in some way, also came under attack.

In 2000, the cops succeeded in pressuring then-city councillor Olivia Chow into resigning from the police board after she made remarks criticizing the police response to a protest in front of Queen’s Park that turned violent.

In 2003, Alan Heisey, another man who was viewed as a police critic, was appointed to be chair of the Toronto Police Service Board. And within a week, the Toronto Police had leaked a memo claiming that Heisey had told a sex crimes investigator that he understood how someone could be attracted to an eight-year-old. It was a blatant attempt to smear their new boss as a pedophile.

When city councillor John Filion was appointed to the police board in 2004, details of his divorce were leaked to the Toronto Sun. While it has never been proven this was done by the Toronto police, Filion made it clear who he thought was behind the story. He also alleged that neighbours had complained to him that someone was surveilling his home.

All of this created a situation where Toronto police board members became fearful of criticizing, let alone enforcing any kind of accountability from, the Toronto police. In the words of one former vice-chair of the board, they had become “the tail wagging the dog.”

And to see just how cowed the police board eventually became, you only have to look at what happened in 2007, when news of that secret investigation into Susan Eng finally became public. Instead of demanding an explanation of how such inappropriate and illegal surveillance could have taken place, the police board ordered an investigation into how the story had become public.

While there hasn’t been evidence of this kind of surveillance in recent years, the Toronto police board has not been able to reassert true civilian oversight over the cops. Under Bill Blair, who was seen as a leader of a new generation of progressive cops, the Toronto police continued to do what they willed. The mass arrests and absurd levels of police brutality during the G20 protests in 2010 were only one indication. By the end of his tenure, Blair was fighting the police board tooth-and-nail over carding, refusing to implement new regulations over the blatantly illegal practice. Toronto police board chair Alok Mukherjee all but admitted that Blair was “insubordinate” and was forced to compromise with him.

Blair, like Fantino before him, was rewarded for this disobedience. He was elected to parliament, made a minister, and, just last week, was appointed to the cushiest job in government — high commissioner to the United Kingdom.

Like the Special Investigations Unit, the Toronto Police board has demonstrated time-and-time again that it doesn’t have the will or the ability to hold the cops to account.

As the power of institutions like the police board have waned, the police union continues to be in the ascendancy. The Toronto Police Association is probably the single most powerful political force in this city, a cozy position its enjoyed for years.

Here’s what former TPA president Craig Bromell told The Toronto Star in 2016.

“We weren’t the most powerful police union, we were the most powerful union in the country. We were it.”

And he was clear-eyed about what the union did.

“The police union’s only job is to protect those who protect others, not the community, not the politicians. Their only function in life is to protect those coppers and their civilian members.”

Whenever politicians proposed any changes in an attempt to reign the police in, the TPA had numerous tools at its disposal to make sure that they got their way.

If an officer was disciplined in a manner the union disagreed with, they’d initiate a wild-cat strike, refusing to do their jobs. If there were tense negotiations over a new contract, the union would threaten that police might be liable to get the “Blue Flu” and all call in sick at once if they didn’t get their way.

Take for example one of the many recent fights over the police budget. By the end of Bill Blair’s tenure as chief, the Toronto police were being asked to find savings in their ever-ballooning budgets. This did not go over well with the Toronto Police Association. The police responded with an unofficial labour action where they refused to enforce traffic laws. This was never officially acknowledged by either the top brass or the police union, but the consequences for everyday Torontonians were very real. The number of collisions in the city skyrocketed by 2018, while the money brought in by tickets declined by over $30 million.

The union has long had the power to make-or-break political careers. They’ll label city councillors and MPPs they didn’t like as “soft-on-crime,” a political death sentence in a city always anxious about public safety. And they too have conducted their own off-the-books surveillance operations into police critics.

All together, the political power of the police union has created a situation where, almost without fail, the police budget increases, even when other municipal services are being squeezed. And despite the fact that it’s city council that provides the actual money that funds the police force, they don’t get a say in what the cops spend that money on. In fact, until 2020, city councillors couldn’t even see what was in the budget itself.

The power of the police union has never been more evident than in the last few years, where they’ve won even larger budgets for themselves — a 60 per cent increase over ten years — at a time when the city has been in a state of fiscal crisis. Just days ago, they received a $94 million increase, even in the wake of the corruption allegations.

The union fights tooth-and-nail to protect the other financial benefits that cops are given, like being first-in-line for lucrative off-duty contracts to guard municipal construction sites, a job that often pays around $100 an hour. And regardless of the severity of the misconduct, the police union will use every tool in its power to ensure no Toronto police officer faces any consequences for what they do on the job.

Together, all of this has created a police force whose first and last loyalty is to itself.

Which brings us back to the incredible allegations announced last week.

As always, whenever there’s a story about police corruption, the top cops went to great lengths to paint this as a case of “a few bad apples.”

“We will not let actions of a few define the reputation of the many,” thundered TPS Chief Myron Demkiw from the podium.

And while details are still minimal, the little we do know paints an extraordinary portrait of a broken institution. First, there’s the breadth of the corruption. The eight officers came from four completely different police divisions (11, 12, 23 and 52), as well as a member of a city-wide task force. In other words, many of these officers did not even work together, unlike the Scherzer crew, which was a more limited story of a drug squad gone bad.

When asked by the press how these disparate officers even knew each other, York Regional Police said that they were connected by a single officer, Constable Timothy Barnhard.

“Our information led us to believe that it was relationships that Constable Barnhard had with other officers….But instead of framing it as individual divisions, I would frame it more as relationships amongst individual police officers, connected specifically to Constable Barnhard at the genesis of this investigation.”

Now one of the most important things to understand about these allegations is that the investigation didn’t begin within the Toronto Police, but the York Regional Police, a neighbouring force. And that might be the most damning fact of all.

Because if we are to believe the police narrative about this case, it means that one constable, with ties to a drug trafficker, was able to recruit seven others into a criminal conspiracy. This leads to one of the three possibilities. Either every single police officer who Constable Barnhard approached agreed to join with him to commit crimes. Or, Barnhard approached other officers, who declined, but those officers refused to speak out about it. Or finally, there were Toronto police who were approached by Barnhard, reported his conduct through the proper channels, and nothing was done to stop him.

Each of those possibilities leaves us with the same conclusion — the Toronto Police is broken.

And there were opportunities to stop Barnhard before. In 2016, he pled guilty of using his police powers to illegally investigate a man who he had gotten in an argument with. He lied, claiming that he’d seen the man run a red light, using that as an excuse to search him and issue him a ticket. When Barnhard finally admitted to the lie, his punishment was giving up a few days of pay.

Of course, this isn’t just a Toronto problem — we’re already seeing three officers suspended in connection with the investigation from the Peel Regional Police.

Now I don’t want to downplay the fact that these charges have indeed come to light. According to the York Regional Police, more than 400 officers from four different law enforcement agencies participated in Project South, the seven-month investigation that led to these arrests. They should be applauded for that.

“The investigating officers represent the very best in what we expect of our police officer; demonstrating integrity, professionalism, ethical investigations, and a commitment to uncovering the truth and holding offenders accountable, including fellow police officers,” YRP deputy chief Hogan said during the press conference.

Hogan is correct. Even without knowing the details, I don’t doubt that Project South involved some of the most impressive police work that this province has seen.

And yet, I’m still left asking myself an uncomfortable question. How many of those 400 officers who were involved in this totem of police accountability have ever witnessed their fellow officers engaging in unethical or criminal activity, and refused to report it?

“We have left no stone unturned,” TPS Chief Demkiw told reporters. But so far, that’s obviously not the case. Other people within the police service knew something about what was going on. Kicking every single one of those officers off of the force will only be the beginning of accountability.

Ontario’s inspector-general for policing, a relatively new police watchdog, has already ordered a province-wide investigation that will focus on issues such as access to police databases, vetting of officers and how officers are supervised. All of that is well and good. But if history is any guide, this new watchdog will do what the old ones did — put the interests of the police ahead of the public.

That’s because the problem with the Toronto Police, and police services across this country, is a political one. They are simply too powerful.

That power consistently allows them to evade external accountability and creates a culture where corruption is tolerated. Whenever controversies like this arise, reforms are initiated, police chiefs are fired, oversight agencies are created. But the fundamental problem never changes.

In fact, we can already see the wheels of this big blue machine beginning to spin. Chief Demkiw claimed that understaffing was partially to blame for this corruption, incredibly turning this story about massive police misconduct into another opportunity to turn on the money spigot. The Toronto Police Association has demanded that they, and every other police union, be given a seat at the table for the inspector-general’s investigation.

And politician after politician has already started to fall into line. Councillor Shelley Carroll, the current chair of the police services board, expressed her “utmost confidence” in Chief Demkiw. Mayor Olivia Chow pushed through that $94 million increase to the police budget with barely a debate. And Premier Doug Ford called this all “ a bump in the road” and deployed that ever-present cliche. That this was merely a few “bad apples.”

We’re long past the point where the Toronto Police need to be brought to heel. If the cops continue to resist reform, then maybe revolution is in order. It’s time to start contemplating radical measures that will severely limit their power — you could start by taking routine discipline out of the hands of uniformed officers; assigning police responsibilities like traffic and parking enforcement to other municipal agencies; and finding ways to break the back of the police union.

But the most radical reform of all may also be the most necessary — civilianizing the police force. It is not a commandment from heaven that all police forces need to be treated like the military, where one rises through the ranks and only uniformed officers can manage one another. Few other institutions in our society operate in this way. This is what creates the “thin blue line” culture where officers do whatever they can to protect each other, even at the cost of the public’s well-being.

Why can’t civilians be brought in to manage cops, especially at a time when things have gone so spectacularly wrong?

Of course, that kind of solution is impossible in the near-term, even if it’s necessary in the long-term. For now, we’re left with what we have — a broken institution that we have no real way of holding to account.

In the aftermath of this corruption investigation, there’s been a lot of talk about trust. Mayor Olivia Chow said that the police have to “earn” back the trust of residents and Premier Doug Ford said that “I don’t want the public to lose trust in our great police.”

But the problem with all of that rhetoric is that the Toronto Police never earned our trust to begin with.

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