Police response under microscope after deadly beating

It is simply not good enough to say that Joseph Perron fell between the cracks on a turbulent night in this city when police were overwhelmed by urgent call-outs.

The 51-year-old was murdered inside that crack.

Beaten to death, discovered by emergency first responders in a field behind a Parkdale highrise apartment building on June 13. Pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Health Centre.

An arrest was made by homicide detectives just six days later, Raymond Moore, 42, charged with second-degree murder. Swift resolve, resulting from crucially quick and helpful tips from the community after police posted security camera video that captured the suspect walking towards the West Lodge complex and, later, a photo of the man being sought.

Suspect and accused did not previously know each other, police have told the Star. That’s extra alarming.

Killing a person with one’s fists is no brisk task. Minutes do matter.

Witnesses who saw the assault called 911. It came in around 8:30 p.m. and went out as an assault in progress.

Surely such an incident, even with no further details, demands responding with alacrity.

It took between 90 minutes and three hours — estimates from bystanders wildly divergent — for front-line cops to get there. In fact, officers, when they finally got around to it, went first to the hospital, informed by EMS that the victim had been transferred and had died 40 minutes earlier. And it was paramedics — as first reported by Catherine McDonald of Global TV — who showed police where the victim had been found.

On that evening, cops in busy west end 11 Division had their hands full, with a robbery and sexual assault in progress at the same time as the beating was reported. There was an unusually high volume of radio calls as cruisers raced around the area, said Supt. Heinz Kuck, unit commander of 11 Division, which only a few weeks ago was amalgamated with neighbouring 22 Division — their criminal investigation bureaus, not their uniform staff — as part of implementing recommendations from a groundbreaking transitional task force unveiled more than a year ago.

To modernize the Toronto Police Service, make it more agile, better service-delivery operational. And, let’s be frank, less expensive, with a view to lopping the police budget by $100 million.

Although anyone who’s tried to call the main switchboard, even 911, might dispute the streamlining effectiveness — and that’s with the police board in April approving the hiring of 50 new operators in the communications centre to tackle increasing wait time and staffing shortage. On top of the board last summer setting aside its declared three-year hiring freeze, with 80 police recruits to have been brought on by the end of 2017, primarily to offset an unexpectedly high level of retirements and reassignments.

But the “modernization,” with pushback from the police union, continues apace — 53 and 55 Divisions have been amalgamated already, 32 and 33 Divisions were consolidated in April.

Are these measures genuinely refining and enhancing how police services are being delivered in Toronto?

The evidence is underwhelming thus far.

In the case of Perron, a dreadfully laggard response time may have cost his life. And if the victim’s next of kin ever come forward, they may have the makings of a strong civil law suit.

Yes, there were many bad moons rising that aligned a week ago Wednesday. But Toronto expects better of its police than, at the very minimum, 90 minutes for a lethal beating in progress.

The city has been convulsing with violence and murder and gang crime in recent months. On Thursday, 800 officers in a multi-jurisdictional operation executed more than 50 search warrants in pre-dawn raids targeting the Five Point Generalz. The notorious street gang, spawned in the Weston Rd. and Lawrence Ave. area but their mayhem radiating across the GTA, has been around for nearly two decades. Police Chief Mark Saunders told a press conference that a large chunk of the Generalz had been dismantled — which we’ve heard before — with 70 people arrested and a “significant” amount of firearms and narcotics seized.

Complicated special operations, however, have little to do with front-line officers contending with the day-to-day grind of living and dying in Toronto.

Saunders has claimed that the police department is nimble enough to redeploy units when the need arises. This clearly did not happen on June 13.

“I’m not going to let that occurrence define the Toronto Police Service when we have close to 2 million radio calls a year and by and large we are there all of the time,” Saunders said Thursday.

“As we modernize — I’ll be very clear — when I look at what is asked of my front-line people, the amount of calls that we have to do that are not police-related. Why do I have officers guarding Hydro lines that are down?

“I need resources that are doing the right thing at the right time. We talk about the modernization plan, part of that equation is that most of the calls are non-emergency. We need to take a look at that playbook and we need to fix that playbook, and start deflecting those calls that we shouldn’t be doing that we are doing right now.

“I’m glad that we made the apprehension. We will look to see what we can do to better our response to any call. But, I’ll be clear, to isolate and cherry-pick any call and say that’s the Toronto police is inflammatory, it’s wrong.”

It’s correct to say one isolated incident doesn’t define the police force. But the undercurrent of staffing issues has become a chronic denominator — not just politicized by the police association — and it was definitely an element in the poky response to Perron’s beating. Enough so that Supt. Kuck is conducting an internal review of the matter.

“There are several things I’m looking at,” Kuck told the Star on Thursday. “With the dispatchers, what were they doing or not doing in deploying other assets? We also have the TPOC (Toronto Police Operations Centre) that oversees everything from the 10,000 foot level, operations happening across the city. If everything is jammed, it’s their responsibility to redirect and reallocate resources. With my own supervisors, they’re in the trenches, they’re supposed to be operationally savvy.”

What Kuck doesn’t say — and to be fair he doesn’t yet know — is why nothing apparently worked right on that night; why, most vitally, a police car was not deployed from a neighbouring division for the beating in process.

“Borders of divisions are becoming slightly erased,” Kuck explained.

“For the most part we are adequately staffed. But response time varies from division to division and road time in different divisions, just getting there in traffic.

“We all shoulder the responsibility to find out what happened and, if there was an error in judgment, to see what we can do to make sure it better not happen again.

“This should not have ended the way it did.”

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno