Bungled probe further divides police, village
There’s a guy in the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood who goes around peeling and scraping posters off poles and walls. Whether it’s an advert for a lost dog, garage sale, or a political screed, he’ll rip it down. Coupled with the effects of weather, a poster on the street or in the park around here usually doesn’t last very long.
That’s why the missing-people posters that were found throughout the neighbourhood over many months and even years were so conspicuously remarkable: they were always replaced immediately. The family and friends of the missing never gave up, and for the rest of us living in the neighbourhood, they were always there, the wallpaper of our public living room, impossible to ignore.
The family and friends didn’t give up even when they were told by the Toronto police, whose motto is “to serve and protect,” that there was nothing to see here, patting them on the head and telling them to move along.
The posters haunted this neighbourhood. You could not walk the dog, go to the market or come home at night without seeing a picture of somebody missing. You could walk down Church St. or linger in the park and overhear people talking about missing people. It was on everyone’s mind all the time.
When accused serial killer Bruce McArthur was arrested, the men in the Metro Central YMCA change room talked about it, crowding around the TV in the lounge, watching the news in shock. Conversations could be overheard on street corners and in cafés. Each time there is a breaking bit of news about McArthur there is at least one television truck parked near Church and Wellesley with a reporter on the sidewalk doing a live hit. Even if you don’t read or listen to the news that day you’ll know something happened. Check your phone and, yes, there is more news, yet more horror.
The missing people unrelated to the McArthur case sent similar shock waves through this neighbourhood. After police didn’t find Tess Richey, her body was found by her own mother two blocks from where she went missing. Afterwards, the makeshift memorial for her grew for weeks with hundreds of individual flowers and bouquets left beside the Church St. stairwell where she was murdered.
The body of Alloura Wells was found in the Rosedale Ravine, and only identified months later after her own family and friends never gave up asking about her. Her photo, like Tess Richey’s and the missing men, stared out from those posters relentless in a neighbourhood that knew something was amiss.
This week McArthur was charged with a seventh murder and Toronto police say they are searching 70 properties across the city and looking at 15 other cold cases that date back to the 1970s. Whenever there’s a new revelation it’s like a seismic wave goes through the neighbourhood, each another reminder of what happened, and that there’s more to come.
Despite the community living with all this, and the indefatigable efforts of family and friends to find the people they loved, in February, Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders said one of the reasons they failed to catch McArthur earlier was because civilians were uncooperative. The evidence on the streets suggests otherwise. All of this is why there’s now an external investigation into how the police handle missing persons reports. It has ratcheted up an already fraught relationship between police and this community.
With dark but sharp humour, CBC radio’s satirical quiz show Because News opened their program last weekend with a joke that got to the heart of the matter: “The Toronto police have withdrawn their request to march in this year’s Pride Parade. This will be the first year the police missed the parade since that one year where everyone in the gay community tried to tell them there was a parade, but the police didn’t believe them and refused to investigate.”
After Black Lives Matter disrupted the parade two years ago to draw attention to how some members of the community were being treated, the police were asked not to participate in the parade last year. This year, they submitted an application to march, but last week Pride asked them to withdraw it, which Chief Saunders did.
For Toronto’s LGBT community, this is not an easy or unanimously supported decision. There are those who are old enough to remember the very bad old days when the police violently raided bathhouses and spied on them through peepholes. Some of them see official police participation in Pride as a victory. That’s understandable, but it’s important to never forget the Pride parade began as a protest, and once comfortable, it’s easy to forget that it’s still the bad old days for some people in this city today.
The bungled police investigation into missing people in our community has further revealed how fraught this relationship is, both historically and present day, and why it needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Still, last week on Metro Morning, host Matt Galloway had an incredibly frustrating interview with Deputy Chief Barbara McLean. Though a member of the LGBT community herself, she would not directly answer Galloway’s questions about whether or not people in this community are treated differently by police, instead ducking and weaving with corporate speak about “opportunities to listen” and repeating that she’s hearing people are very satisfied with their service, though sometimes they “fall short.”
If this is the weak, defensive and evasive institutional response to a Toronto community that is experiencing an ongoing atrocity that reveals more of itself every few weeks, there’s little hope of trust returning to this relationship.
In the meantime, the neighbourhood is in a kind of bracing stasis, as everyone here knows there’s more horror coming in the McArthur case.