Post #387501

Today’s episode of The Hatchet is a damning rundown of the history of corruption at the Toronto Police Service. But unlike the author's conclusion, this shitpile cannot be reformed. It is rotten from the core. Every person in the PROVINCE needs to either read or listen to it. (And as much as I hate linking to substacks, this is where it is.) ❝ This case of corruption is only the latest symptom of an obviously sick institution. On the Toronto subreddit, one user named u/whatistheQuestion¹, compiles a rolling list of news stories about local police misconduct every year. It makes for desultory reading — police shootings, excessive force, robbing civilians, lying on the stand, professional incompetence, sexual assault, drunk driving and every other kind of bad behaviour under the sun. There are around five thousand sworn officers in the service. And it’s truly hard to imagine a random sampling of five thousand city residents committing as many unethical and illegal actions on a regular basis. And the irony is that most of those stories recount the kinds of incidents that are in the news one day and gone the next. Ask your average Torontonian, and they’re likely to mention an entirely separate set of major scandals — the G20 mass arrests; the killings of people in mental health crisis, like Sammy Yatim and Andrew Loku; the specious murder prosecution of Umar Zameer; the longtime use of carding against Black boys and men; sexual harassment of female officers within the department; the negligence of allowing a serial killer to run rampant in the city’s queer community; and much more. At first glance, all of these controversies might seem to have little do with one another. But what unites all of these, as well as the most recent corruption scandal, is that they all share the same root cause — impunity. The cops simply aren’t accountable to anyone outside of themselves. ❞ Read the rest, or better still, listen to The Hatchet in your favourite podcast app. https://hatchetmedia.substack.com/p/the-toronto-police-has-been-a-rogue ________ ¹ https://www.reddit.com/user/whatistheQuestion/ #Toronto #FuckThePolice #PoliceDontKeepUsSafe #PoliceDontPreventCrime #DefundDisarmDismantle #Abolish