Tweets a poetic narrative of trauma in T.O.
I’ve been obsessed with the tweets of one Toronto cop for months. They come from the Toronto Police Service Operations Twitter account, @TPSOperations, and are signed simply “DH.”
Other officers tweet in shifts from the account but when I see “ˆDH” I’ll read back for a darkly poetic narrative of Toronto’s Metropolitan trauma. Here’s a sample from recent weeks:
“FIGHT / St Clair Av + Alfreda Blvd / 1 person armed with a taser / Woman suspect / Police en route / Be careful in area DH”
“HAZARD / Nathan Phillips Square / Security reports someone has tied syringes to the doors / Happened on 2 occasions / No injuries dh” “COLLISION / Florence Av + Botham Rd / Pedestrian struck / Woman appears to be injured / Lying in roadway / Police en route / May be delays DH
Line by line, it’s a deadpan pentameter of a city seemingly on the edge. The author behind the “dh” tweets is Const. David Hopkinson and he manages to say so much with so few words. If only we could all write so sparely with so much meaning.
The tweets are evocative of the noir New York portrayed in the late 1950s TV show Naked City that closed with the line: “There are eight million stories in the naked city.
This has been one of them.” There are other Toronto accounts that evoke the same feeling.
The Star runs @StarRadioBox, an homage to the days when reporters would exclusively listen to the radio in a “radio room” in search of breaking news.
There’s also @LateNightCam, the twitter account of CBC cameraman Tony Smyth who photographs news across the entire GTA overnight. He’s Toronto’s Weegee, the pseudonym for photojournalist Arthur Fellig who snapped New York’s dark side from the 1930s until 1960s.
Hopkinson uses phrases like “spun out” and “T-boned,” the way normal people talk, avoiding most cop jargon, though on occasion he does evoke an old-school officious Toronto voice, once even intoning that both Liberals and Blue Jay fans “observe the laws” when celebrating their respective wins on Oct. 19.
Watching all of these also gives a quick lesson in how many pedestrians and cyclists are hit by cars on our streets.
There are usually no names, context or followup, so there’s a risk a feed like this could become sensationalistic, but there is something about the way Hopkinson tweets that brings out the humanity.
Take this tweet from October 22: “HAZARD / Sherbourne St + Carlton St / Reports of naked man running into traffic / Possible medical issue / Police/amb on way / May be delays.”
What initially sounds like yet another wild night in the city and fodder for jokes becomes a human moment with the line “possible medical issue:” somebody is in distress, somebody needs help.
Often, reports of missing people are the hardest to read, with brief details of their life, appearance and where they were last seen: you want to go out looking for them yourself.
In the confines of an institutional Twitter account, Hopkinson has been able to clearly carve out a style that is his own, and one that serves the public well. It’s much different than the main @TorontoPolice account that has nearly 180,000 followers, which is often employed as a useless PR machine for the police.
Have questions about G20 abuses, or the carding of young men of coloured in Toronto, and they will go unanswered.
Why do public institutions have PR accounts, which we all pay for, if they will not engage with the public?
Hopkinson’s beautiful cop voice is the best PR the Toronto Police will ever have and he and his colleagues running the @TPSOperations Twitter account are the clearest voices articulating the essential and appreciated work the police do for us everyday. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.