Police have plenty to answer for
By this point in the shlock opera that is the Rob Ford story, it’s a given that the Toronto mayor is, to borrow from Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar on Wayne’s World, not worthy.
He is not worthy of defending. He is not worthy of the benefit of the doubt. He’s not worthy of another chance.
What Mr. Ford is is hard bloody work, and after months of duplicity, he has managed to squander the public trust. And with each new low he attains — the bar is now well below the ground — he exhausts even the residue of goodwill that remained for him even after the last of the trust had gone. So don’t cry for him. But maybe say a prayer for someone else in the future — the next demon-plagued politician or public figure to come along, or perhaps just the next one who is merely unconventional or unpopular with the city establishment — because there sure are some sobering questions about the Toronto Police investigation that has played such a significant role in Mr. Ford’s downfall.
As you know, the mayor is not charged criminally with any offence, though as we all have learned, with this boy never say never.
Indeed the only people who were charged as a result of the five-month-long, resource-rich police probe that was launched in May, after Gawker. com and the Toronto Star published stories about the notorious crack video starring Mr. Ford, are Sandro Lisi and the owner of a dry-cleaning shop.
The mayor’s occasional, unofficial driver, believed by Mr. Ford’s staff to be his drug connection, Lisi is charged with trafficking in marijuana and with extortion, this in connection with an alleged attempt to retrieve the video.
(I confess to some puzzlement here. If you are attempting to sell to the highest bidder a video showing me smoking crack, and I attempt to convince you otherwise, which of us is guilty of attempted extortion? But I digress.)
The more that is released from the massive Information to Obtain a search warrant, which was partially unsealed by the courts on Oct. 31, with more details pouring into the public domain this week, the more curious does the investigation begin to look.
First, it appears that the probe began purely and solely as a result of the May 16 stories on Gawker and in the Star.
According to the search warrant affidavit, two days later, on May 18, homicide Detective-Sergeant Gary Giroux was assigned “to investigate the matter brought forth by the
Toronto Star and Gawker.com and their allegations against Mayor Rob Ford. Specifically to investigate the existence of a cellphone containing a video of Ford smoking crack cocaine.”
Now, I don’t pretend to be terribly familiar with what it takes to kick-start a police probe, and I appreciate that the two published stories were detailed and absolutely correct (as I always believed they were), but I would have thought it took more than media reports of bad or even allegedly criminal conduct.
The investigation itself involved five top detectives, special spin teams to follow Lisi, the mayor and others who popped up on the police radar, the installation of a pole camera outside Lisi’s home, aerial
He exhausts even the residue of goodwill that remained for him
surveillance, the retrieval of phone records via court production orders and similarly the retrieval of gas station surveillance camera footage, the installation of a tracker that was for some period surreptitiously attached to Lisi’s vehicle and the seizure and meticulous going-over of garbage discarded by the two men.
All of the fruits of this labour (including the discovery of McDonald’s bags and empty bottles of booze in the garbage seizure and the July 28 note that the mayor had urinated in public) were described in the ITO for several search warrants that were ultimately executed at Lisi’s home, parents’ home, garage and the dry-cleaning establishment.
The picture it generally painted was of two men, Lisi and Mr. Ford, behaving exactly as you would suspect people involved in drug transactions might behave — a lot of surreptitious meetings in out of the way places, packages or white bags seemingly left by Lisi in Mr. Ford’s conveniently unlocked car, surveillance-awareness and the sort of conduct which is, in police lingo, “indicative” of drug dealing.
And yet, except for one occasion where the undercover officers were so alarmed by Lisi’s dangerous driving that they had uniformed officers in a squad car stop him and give him a ticket (the search warrant says this seemed to have the desired effect of slowing him down), the police did nothing.
Indeed, and I can’t tell you how much this pains me, but it appears that the lawyer Clay Ruby may have had a point when he said furiously after the first ITO release that the police had given the mayor a deliberate pass.
I am reliably informed that on operations like this, as Mr. Ruby said, police routinely make arrests in what looks like mid-transaction.
In this instance, officers would swoop in, place Mr. Ford and Lisi under arrest and secure their vehicles until a judge authorized a search warrant. If they found nothing, they would apologize (it being the mayor) and move on: They had reasonable grounds.
But if they found something — one party had cash in a pocket, the other had drugs, or both had drugs — things would have been much cleaner, both for the police force and for Mr. Ford.
Had the mayor been facing a criminal charge, he would have had the treasured benefits that flow to those accused but presumed innocent: He would have had his day in court, and the press coverage until that time would have been necessarily somewhat muted so as not to prejudice his fair trial.
And the police force — and here I’m not referring to the detectives in the case but the command that gives them orders — would have been able to say, in effect, “Hey, we did our job” and also awaited disposition in the courts.
Instead, what we had on Oct. 31 was Police Chief Bill Blair confirming the existence of the crack video and saying he was “disappointed” by what he’d seen.
All that can be read like this: The police did by the back door — gave the stamp of approval to the disgracing of Mr. Ford and to the notion that this was correct and in the public interest — what for some reason they were unwilling to do by the front, that is, with an arrest and charge.
Shed no tears for Mr. Ford, but as Martha Stewart might say, it’s not a good thing. Spare a thought for the next fellow who is subjected to trial in the court of public opinion, aided and abetted by the police.