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. Anothe
