Police must clear the air

There’s an old political adage, attributed to Ronald Reagan, that goes like this: “When you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders has been doing all too much explaining this week in the wake of his comments in another newspaper about the investigation into missing persons in the Church and Wellesley area.

A lot of people in the LGBTQ community took great exception to what they saw as a suggestion by the chief that they were somehow responsible for the fact that a serial killer was able to operate, undetected, for years.

“We knew that people were missing and we didn’t have the right answers,” he said. “But nobody was coming to us with anything.”

Saunders now says he didn’t mean to point fingers and was trying to make a more general observation about such complex investigations. He’s been spending a lot of time explaining his remarks, in other words, and in the process he’s been losing credibility with the public. In particular, he’s been damaging his force’s relationship with a community that is understandably traumatized by the revelations about accused killer Bruce McArthur.

The chief and the police services board urgently need to rebuild trust. They should start by committing to an independent review of how the Toronto force handled its investigations into missing persons in the LGBTQ community in recent years.

Saunders says the force will conduct its own internal investigation and promises to make the findings public.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The force’s relations with the LGBTQ community have been badly shaken, and it should agree to an independent review. At this point, an internal police probe alone won’t be enough to clear the air.

The McArthur case is truly appalling. He has now been charged with six counts of first-degree murder stretching over seven years, and there are fears that more people who went missing over the years around the Church-Wellesley neighbourhood may have fallen victim to a serial killer.

For all sorts of reasons it’s worth reviewing in detail how the police have handled the case and whether they did enough in response to earlier suspicions that a serial killer might be on the loose around Church and Wellesley. It’s not just a matter of assigning blame for any failures; it would be an opportunity to learn everything possible from a major, complicated crime that seems to have stretched over many years.

Chief Saunders himself says he would “support anything that enhances the trust and accountability factor of our organization. I want to make sure, on the walk forward, that we get it right.”

Given that, he and the police services board would do themselves a favour by embracing rather than resisting calls for an independent review.

Those calls are growing louder as the extent of the McArthur case becomes clearer. A group called the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention, for one, wants a review to consider whether the race or “perceived sexuality” of men who went missing around Church and Wellesley affected how much effort the police put into figuring out what happened to them.

That’s the kind of question an independent review could credibly address. Even if the Toronto force comes up with its own answer, it won’t be fully believed at this point where it matters most — in the very community that was allegedly targeted over many years by a serial killer.

We know how these things generally go: criticism mounts and the pressure builds for some sort of outside review. Finally, the organization at the centre of the controversy (in this case, the Toronto police) concedes the need for an investigation.

It would be far better to get ahead of all this and simply do the right thing. The police service should agree to an independent review of everything connected to the McArthur case. It should stop explaining and excusing and start leading.

Toronto police should agree to an independent review of everything related to the Bruce McArthur case