Full Comment - A veteran cop explains what’s really happening inside Canadian policing

00:00:00.000 We're all fascinated by police shows, by detectives solving murders on television, but what's it really like?

00:00:09.220 Well, Hank Insignia was in the Toronto Police Service for 34 years.

00:00:13.540 He spent 18 years in the Homicide Division, five years heading up the country's largest homicide police service.

00:00:19.940 So, what is it like? That's part of what he discusses in his new book, The High Road, Confessions of a Homicide Cop.

00:00:25.980 But he also talks about personal reasons for why he ended up in the police service, his experience with anti-Semitism within the Toronto Police Service, and pulls back the curtain on the politics behind all of it.

00:00:39.640 We sat down to chat with Hank Insigne. Here's our discussion.

00:00:44.040 Hank, after more than 30 years as a police officer, I know you've been retired for a couple of years now, but 30 years as a police officer, so many covering homicide. Is there one case that you worked on, murder or otherwise, that still haunts you, keeps you up at night, bothers you?

00:01:01.680 you know i had a case uh and i really can't talk too much about specifics of the case but i had a

00:01:10.000 case very early on in homicide that uh we worked really hard on for months and months on end

00:01:15.940 uh and we laid charges and we had multiple trials and at the end of the day uh our accused was

00:01:24.260 acquitted. And I still think about that one, I think more than any others. Uh, but the nice

00:01:31.940 thing about 34 years in policing, uh, I still have a lot of great memories of, uh, cases back

00:01:40.820 in 14 division in my uniform days as well, uh, in the major crime unit in, in uniform, uh, working

00:01:48.260 there is those are some of the best times um and a lot of those cases really never come to light

00:01:55.920 because they're not as uh sexy and interesting as the homicide cases in the public eye well i mean

00:02:03.820 homicide cases that takes up an awful lot of time uh in our um entertainment world think of all the

00:02:11.480 movies the cop shows uh we all watch law and order uh we even watch law and order toronto which is

00:02:18.240 really realistic because people get convicted as opposed to just giving bail over and over again

00:02:22.700 um sorry that's my joke about our justice system but you know how different is it between what we

00:02:30.660 see on tv and what you dealt with what does the public misunderstand or not get about homicide

00:02:39.400 investigations because we've been misinformed from watching too much csi you know uh csi which is uh

00:02:47.820 which obviously is complete fiction uh loosely very loosely based on real cases that they've

00:02:55.980 taken a massage massaged into a drama series um law and order a little more true to actual cases

00:03:05.900 but no homicide obviously gets solved in 45 minutes uh really

00:03:10.700 it's uh well 20 minutes and then 20 minutes for the uh for the court process right i mean these

00:03:18.940 things take place over years uh sometimes usually months and months uh before you can even lay a

00:03:28.800 charge and then of course uh doing the investigation and making that arrest and laying that charge if

00:03:35.520 you've been fortunate enough to get to a point where you can gather enough evidence to lay that

00:03:41.200 charge is one-third of the process. You've still got your preliminary inquiry, which happens in

00:03:49.200 90% of homicide cases. So that's kind of the trial before the trial. Yeah, before a provincial

00:03:57.300 court judge. And that provincial court judge, upon hearing the evidence, decides if there's

00:04:02.520 enough evidence that a jury could, uh, possibly convict, uh, the accused at superior court. So

00:04:09.780 you, you do that and that's just almost as much work as an actual trial. Uh, and then months later

00:04:16.960 you get your actual trial down at the superior court. So literally your, your investigation is

00:04:22.900 one third of that time. Uh, and I'd say the, uh, the most amount of work comes after you close that

00:04:28.420 cell door and uh after you've laid the charge so and then the investigations themselves uh like i

00:04:34.720 said what you see on tv is uh isn't that realistic when it comes to the long hours and the amount of

00:04:41.220 work going on in the background um and one thing they always get wrong uh in tv series as good as

00:04:49.120 some of them are like uh if you remember remember the wire uh which i thought was really really good

00:04:56.180 as far as the politics and the semantics of investigating drugs and homicide goes.

00:05:02.980 But when was the last time you saw a homicide detective on a TV show

00:05:07.280 sitting down and writing notes for hours on end?

00:05:12.160 You just don't see that.

00:05:13.020 And that's part of what you had to do.

00:05:14.840 Oh, that's a huge part of it, right?

00:05:16.980 Any homicide case that you investigate,

00:05:19.440 the very simplest one is still going to produce hundreds of pages of notes,

00:05:23.940 and most of them produce thousands of pages of notes for one officer,

00:05:28.380 especially the major case managers and the primary investigators.

00:05:32.840 So that's, I think, the old adage of the paperwork.

00:05:38.480 There's so much paperwork.

00:05:40.760 There really literally is a lot of paperwork.

00:05:43.680 There's politics within policing as well,

00:05:47.120 and there's even politics within the homicide investigations.

00:05:50.780 Being a homicide detective is an odd career choice.

00:05:55.520 It's lots of people grow up thinking they want to be a cop,

00:05:58.500 but maybe not necessarily homicide detectives.

00:06:01.420 But you write in the book about how your grandfather

00:06:05.640 and his murder during the Holocaust

00:06:08.400 was kind of the catalyst for you going into this career.

00:06:14.100 Do you think you're still trying to solve that one?

00:06:16.160 um i mean i was fortunate enough that uh my aunt back in holland really spent her entire adult life

00:06:29.220 pursuing the clues and the evidence which brought us to a point in the late 70s early 80s where we

00:06:36.160 had a pretty good idea of exactly what had happened to my grandfather um and even my uncle

00:06:43.700 who disappeared shortly after the war

00:06:47.380 because the three kids, as I talk about in the book,

00:06:50.480 were sent to different orphanages in Holland.

00:06:54.640 And he wasn't found again by his sister, my aunt, until the 1970s.

00:07:01.140 So she really did a lot of detective work on the case.

00:07:06.340 And, you know, the Germans kept meticulous records.

00:07:10.400 And once she had that prisoner number,

00:07:13.040 the 27449 prisoner number, she could trace him through multiple concentration camps and ultimately

00:07:21.800 to the gas chamber facility where he was murdered. So obviously, you know, my mother lived with that

00:07:31.420 her entire life. My sisters and myself, we still bear some of the intergenerational trauma,

00:07:38.600 although I don't want to use that as a crutch by any stretch,

00:07:41.920 but it's something that will always dwell in our hearts,

00:07:44.640 and I think that was a real motivation behind writing the book as well

00:07:48.240 and passing that on to future generations

00:07:50.720 who I might not have the opportunity to sit down and chat with them about it.

00:07:56.040 You raised the issue of anti-Semitism inside the Toronto Police Service.

00:08:03.980 How prevalent was it?

00:08:06.080 Was it just part of the water you were swimming in while you were there?

00:08:10.460 Was it the odd person?

00:08:12.580 Talk to us a little bit about that.

00:08:14.760 You know, I think it's part of the water of a society that we're all swimming in.

00:08:18.920 And especially over the last two and a half, three years, where we're really seeing a lot

00:08:24.860 of it rise to the surface.

00:08:26.940 And a lot of these statistics where you become a little bit surprised almost about how prevalent

00:08:34.620 anti-Semitism and Jew hatred is within society as a whole. And if you consider that the police

00:08:40.940 service is supposed to be a reflection of that society, then if you look at the numbers of

00:08:46.600 anti-Semites within society, you would expect to see the same thing within the organization.

00:08:52.440 And I think the onus is on the leadership of the organization to make sure it's not tolerated and

00:08:57.800 that it's stamped out. And unfortunately, that just wasn't happening. So it's not so much about

00:09:03.200 the people in the organization who are anti-Semites or Jew haters. The issue is the

00:09:09.760 culture and the structure which allows those people to be promoted into positions where they

00:09:15.760 can affect the police response to some of the anti-Semitic incidents that we see on the streets

00:09:22.220 and not only get promoted into those positions, but be protected in those positions.

00:09:27.060 From the latest stats on, you're talking about anti-Semitism and Jew hatred.

00:09:33.940 Let me just give you some stats that won't shock you, but should shock anyone else listening.

00:09:40.600 1% of Canadians, Jews make up 1% of Canadians.

00:09:45.180 They are 71% of the hate incidents.

00:09:48.640 Put another way, a Jewish Canadian is 20 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than any other Canadian.

00:09:57.060 Yeah. And, you know, especially since the book came out, I've sat down and I've chatted and I've been in synagogues and talking with the Jewish community online as well. And I'm sure you see it online too. They're scared. It's pretty sad when we see members of the Jewish community standing up and saying, we're getting out of here. It's just become too dangerous.

00:10:25.160 if you can't walk down the street in your own city at any given time of day without having to

00:10:33.460 look over your shoulder and be fearful of being attacked because of your religion,

00:10:38.240 then something's gone horribly wrong in our country. And unfortunately, the Jewish people 1.00

00:10:43.640 have taken overwhelmingly the brunt of that. And that shouldn't be happening. And I think

00:10:49.860 it's a lot of it is up to the police to protect them from that. Do you think that when you

00:10:56.760 experienced anti-Semitism within the force while you were working there, that perhaps you experienced

00:11:03.660 it because to take a term from a different form of discrimination, you passed. People looked at

00:11:12.680 you and they looked at your last name and they, well, he's not a Jew. I can, I can just let rip. 1.00

00:11:17.580 Do you think that was happening?

00:11:20.340 Yeah, I mean, very, very few people realized my background and my heritage in my life or within the police service.

00:11:32.220 So I think people got too comfortable around me and openly made those comments, right?

00:11:40.080 And other communities will experience this as well.

00:11:43.560 Um, and not until those comments got to the point where they were so vile, uh, where I thought the person making those comments who was in the ranks above me was probably one of the most vile Jew haters, uh, I had seen that, uh, that I thought, wow, this, this should not be happening.

00:12:04.000 This should not be happening in this organization.

00:12:07.000 And if I was obviously of Jewish descent, I don't think those comments would ever have been made in front of me.

00:12:21.940 How do you feel the leadership at the Toronto Police Service has dealt with the rise in anti-Semitism that we've seen on the streets?

00:12:32.500 They have just in the past few days announced terrorism charges against one of the leaders that I used to see on a regular basis, leading people through the streets, glorifying Hamas, glorifying the leadership of Hamas, putting out all the chants that, if you understand them, are clearly anti-Semitic.

00:12:56.540 And so charge has been laid now, but for the most part, it's felt like free reign here in Toronto.

00:13:04.380 How do you feel the leadership from Chief Demkew, the mayor, other senior leadership within the police have dealt with this issue?

00:13:13.100 Has it been good? Have they had no options? Has it been horrible?

00:13:17.100 I think it was abysmal. I think from October 7th, 2023 onwards for two and a half years, it was absolutely abysmal.

00:13:26.540 And in the spring of this year, it seemed something, something changed.

00:13:30.580 I think, uh, Michael Kurtzner writing letters to the chief, essentially telling him to do

00:13:35.740 his job, uh, and the establishment of, uh, different units within the police service,

00:13:41.520 uh, to respond to some of these, these incidents, the establishment of a security apparatus

00:13:46.940 within the Jewish community.

00:13:48.800 And then all of a sudden in, in mid April, you started seeing charges getting laid and,

00:13:53.480 uh, and arrests being made.

00:13:54.900 And that should have been happening in, like I said, in October of 2023.

00:14:00.180 I think we hit a really low point at the Art Gallery of Ontario event, which you probably remember, where our Prime Minister and the Prime Minister of Italy were attending a function.

00:14:13.380 And they had to cancel it at the very last second because of the protesters.

00:14:16.800 And I thought that should never, ever be happening in this city.

00:14:19.580 so you see this fellow now who's been charged with these terrorism related offenses and some

00:14:27.140 of the offenses date back to 2024 uh and so there's been a real swing i think within the

00:14:33.560 police service i think they're getting some pretty poor legal advice uh last year and and they even

00:14:40.500 talked about getting that legal advice and exactly what that legal advice was and my position is you

00:14:46.840 I do a lot of media commentary, was legal advice is just that. It's legal advice. If you don't

00:14:52.940 agree with it, you can get a second opinion. And that obviously wasn't happening. So since then,

00:15:00.040 they've certainly gotten some different lawyers on board. And we see a lot of work being done by

00:15:08.620 organization led by Mark Sandler, who's just probably one of the best lawyers in the country,

00:15:14.360 called the Alliance of Canadians Combating Anti-Semitism.

00:15:20.300 And they're working a lot of the behind-the-scenes actions,

00:15:24.580 I think, with the police service,

00:15:26.360 and we're starting to see results now.

00:15:28.440 But I think they've dug themselves a very, very big hole,

00:15:31.940 and that's on the leadership.

00:15:33.520 That's on the leadership of the police service,

00:15:35.480 and that's on the leadership of the city.

00:15:38.280 And, you know, you especially mention Olivia Chow

00:15:41.460 and the deputy mayor, Oswald Malik,

00:15:43.900 And it's pretty clear the positions that they hold when it comes to the anti-Semitism and the issues in Gaza.

00:15:54.120 Well, we're always told that politicians can't direct police.

00:15:58.120 And you mentioned earlier there's politics in policing.

00:16:02.180 Any of us that have been around police investigations, police senior leadership, I've been around that in Montreal and Toronto and Ottawa.

00:16:11.660 That's clearly not the case.

00:16:13.300 and I don't believe that politicians never direct police.

00:16:18.040 You know, we saw a massive show of force

00:16:22.240 by the Toronto Police Service for a restaurant owner

00:16:24.860 that had irritated John Tory during the COVID lockdowns.

00:16:28.420 That doesn't happen just because.

00:16:32.360 I think it's clear that politicians send messages or set tones.

00:16:39.680 What's your experience?

00:16:41.400 I know you were never at the chief level, but what's your experience to politicians, be it a mayor, premier, prime minister, send messages or set the tone for what the chief actually decides, okay, we're going to enforce this or we're going to back off on it.

00:17:03.160 I think that early on, Chief Demkew got the message loud and clear from Mayor Chow, and so he took a very light touch with these protests.

00:17:12.560 Well, I think there's a couple of things in play there. And I think if you consider that the police services board has four appointees from the mayor herself and three from the premier's office, and the chief briefs the mayor, or at least used to in the John Tory days at 6.30 a.m. every single morning.

00:17:38.140 And if you think there's no conversations going on about operational priorities, then you're sadly mistaken. And obviously, if the mayor is influencing the police services board with the four members, obviously the mayor is going to have some influence on the board itself.

00:17:53.680 So you look at the amount of money that's gone to the police service over the last several years since Olivia Chow has been mayor and everyone's, you know, very thankful increasing the funding, but we're paying almost $1.5 billion a year for the police service and the money definitely talks.

00:18:12.660 And the other issue I think that we've seen in the past is the police chiefs who are looking ahead to political careers after their policing careers. And is that affecting their decisions as they run the police service? Are they pandering to their future voter base? I don't think that should be allowed to happen at all, right?

00:18:35.420 We've seen a couple of Toronto police chiefs go on to MP positions.

00:18:41.680 We saw another police chief make an attempt at mayor and a provincial seat.

00:18:49.280 So that's concerning.

00:18:51.460 I think if police chiefs are thinking that far ahead to their future careers, is it affecting the day-to-day decisions they're making in the operations of the police service?

00:19:00.580 So, and I think the way around that, and I've talked about it many times, is we need to change the structure of the command of the police service.

00:19:09.340 And that's been suggested in multiple reviews of police services.

00:19:15.000 In what way would you change it?

00:19:17.200 I think you have to increase the civilianization of the command and the oversight and transparency of command.

00:19:22.720 I don't think we should ever be in a position where one person, that being the chief, should be in control of that entire organization.

00:19:30.580 And it shouldn't be so secretive, the day-to-day operations of that organization, that things can get buried and pushed under the carpet without anybody else knowing.

00:19:44.140 there was just a report out saying that crime is down and of course that's being used to or

00:19:51.660 will be used to say well see we don't need to increase the police budget um don't want to make

00:19:57.640 this all about toronto but let let's talk about um do we need more police on the ground

00:20:03.740 brad bradford's running for mayor in toronto and he says he wants to hire a thousand new officers

00:20:09.220 over four years.

00:20:10.740 That would be an increase from the current plan.

00:20:13.780 And so when I heard about that, I looked back.

00:20:16.600 He made a comparison to 2010,

00:20:19.320 said we have roughly the same number of sworn officers

00:20:22.640 as 16 years ago.

00:20:26.080 And I looked, and according to TPS's own data,

00:20:31.940 it's within like 50 officers.

00:20:34.740 and the population's gone from 2.6 million to 3.2.

00:20:40.120 We've gone from 208 officers per 100,000 to 173.

00:20:45.900 Have we just been saying, you know what,

00:20:48.620 we don't need to worry about having more police officers.

00:20:52.580 The police budget goes up every year,

00:20:54.300 but that's because people get raises every year.

00:20:56.680 Things happen every year.

00:20:57.960 Things cost more.

00:20:59.360 But we're not keeping up with the number of officers out there,

00:21:03.000 at least not on a per capita basis no we shouldn't uh that's our fault over the last 30 years budget

00:21:11.000 has always been an issue when it comes to policing and like i said the uh the amount of money they're

00:21:16.480 pouring into it now is welcome to see and i'm always been a big proponent and a fan of more

00:21:22.020 police officers uh but when they're being effectively used within the city and being

00:21:31.760 effectively trained and professional and transparent, uh, because that's what's causing

00:21:37.380 all the issues right now. So they're having a real hard time keeping up, uh, with their multi-year

00:21:45.120 hiring plan, uh, with retention, uh, of some of the officers and the amount of people retiring

00:21:52.660 and leaving to other, leaving for other police services, uh, to add a thousand officers. I think

00:22:00.520 you could double the size of the police service in Toronto and it could be very, very effective

00:22:04.840 in the city. The question is, what's the cost? How are we ensuring that they're being trained

00:22:11.200 properly? How are we ensuring that we're not losing them to other police services? And

00:22:16.220 how are we going to use these police officers that we have? So when you talk about crime stats,

00:22:23.960 You know, overall, compared to 15 years ago, they really are not down that much.

00:22:33.220 Well, I would actually argue, because I've just looked at them, the community safety indicators where they combine assaults, break-in enters, robberies, etc.

00:22:42.880 the uh it's down to 43 000 incidents in 2025 from 47 000 in 2024 and 49 000 in 23

00:22:54.680 but the 10-year average is 39 000 so it's still up and this is what york regional police have

00:23:02.400 done recently other police services there oh crime's down well yeah from an insane high because

00:23:08.540 i don't know what happened over the past few years crime was up everywhere dramatically and now it's

00:23:14.260 fallen a little bit and people say oh see mission accomplished yeah no far from it uh it comes in

00:23:21.180 ebbs and flows and right now it's at a bit of an ebb uh wait for that next flow uh and i think

00:23:27.540 you'll see it'll it'll skyrocket again uh and you know if you're talking about the difference between

00:23:35.340 49,000 incidents and 47,000 incidents. It'd be interesting to take a look at the margins of

00:23:42.860 error. It'd be interesting to take a look at how they're compiling these statistics,

00:23:47.700 the non-reporting of some incidents. I was part of a community group several months ago,

00:23:53.780 and they were discussing issues within their neighborhood. And one lady played a clip of a

00:24:02.880 fellow coming into her backyard and trying her back door and she had video of it and I said did

00:24:08.400 you report it to the police and she said well no why would I bother what are they going to do with

00:24:12.080 that I said well for all you know two hours later the same guy two blocks north got into somebody's

00:24:18.380 house and and committed a sexual assault and the police are desperately looking for any video

00:24:23.740 footage so you just don't know so you've got to report things like that and several months ago

00:24:29.000 I was reading through one of the reports to the police services board and they talked about how

00:24:34.100 robberies were down. Well, a robbery is essentially a theft with an assault, as you know. And I looked

00:24:40.100 at the stats and I said, okay, robberies are down, but thefts are up and assaults are up.

00:24:44.480 So what's going on here with those statistics, right? So the difference between 47 and 49,

00:24:51.580 I don't think is anything to rest on your laurels about whatsoever. And we've just got to keep

00:24:58.160 keep that fight and keep up the number of police officers and make it a better environment and

00:25:04.700 culture for them to work in so we're not losing them to other organizations all right we need to

00:25:10.460 take a break and i want to get back to your book and more about your career as a homicide detective

00:25:15.460 because it is fascinating hank but we have a quick break first and a shameless plug because

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00:28:43.400 The book is The High Road Confessions of a Homicide Cop.

00:28:48.660 Hank, you were involved in a couple of very high-profile homicides that caught national attention.

00:28:57.820 We're talking about Jane Kriva's Boxing Day shooting, December 2005.

00:29:03.640 Bruce MacArthur, the case which turned out to be a serial murder.

00:29:07.740 Before we talk about the cases individually, tell me what it was like to be involved in such high-profile, media-intensive cases, because most homicides don't make the front page of the newspaper. They don't lead the local news, never mind the national news. What was it like being involved in such very high-profile cases?

00:29:28.380 well you know i spent 18 years in homicide including five of my last years as the unit

00:29:35.560 commander of homicide and jane creba for instance at the end of 2005 which was my first year in

00:29:43.420 homicide uh i was preferably involved in that the entire office got called out it was boxing day

00:29:49.360 we still used an old pager system and the boss just put out an all page anybody who's available

00:29:55.880 come in. So I happened to be one of the, uh, peripheral investigators on that, uh, the night

00:30:01.680 it happened. So by working through, uh, some of the smaller profile cases and cutting your teeth

00:30:11.960 with the small media scrums and the small press conferences, I think as a homicide investigator,

00:30:18.940 you have to be comfortable in front of a TV camera. Um, and I don't think you should be

00:30:24.640 rely on the media relations officers to do your talking for you. I think that's doing a bit of a

00:30:31.980 disservice to your victims. So it's not easy to get in front of the cameras. It takes a lot of

00:30:39.160 practice and you're going to screw up. You're especially going to screw up when you first

00:30:42.880 start doing it. And I still get nervous getting in front of the cameras. I still get nervous

00:30:47.380 jumping on podcasts.

00:30:49.760 You do well.

00:30:51.980 Thank you.

00:30:54.000 And really getting to that point after, you know, 10, 15 years in homicide where you learn

00:31:02.660 to what you can say, what you can't say, and strategically what you should say to help

00:31:09.400 further your investigation just comes with experience and knowledge.

00:31:14.840 So I was very fortunate the last several years of my investigative stint to be involved in some pretty high-profile cases and be able to handle the media and be able to get that public persona out there, which I got a lot of positive feedback from, not just from the media, but from the public itself.

00:31:37.600 And that really has evolved into my post-policing career,

00:31:42.040 which still heavily involves media and public speaking. 0.70

00:31:46.580 In terms of the Kriba case,

00:31:48.840 most murders happen in the shadows.

00:31:53.660 They don't happen in the public.

00:31:55.880 Is the fact that this was maybe Canada's best-known street,

00:32:00.040 happened on Yon Street, happened on Boxing Day

00:32:02.560 because it's a young girl going out to train,

00:32:04.260 you know get some shopping deals with her friends uh is that why it caught the public

00:32:10.520 imagination the the brazen nature of it as well i think that and uh you know i keep using it but

00:32:21.000 i try and avoid the term brazen i mean it's like calling these guys thugs they love that

00:32:26.960 right uh and i think really all of the above young girl shopping with her family boxing day

00:32:35.400 right in the heart of the city right on young street a world famous street and you remember

00:32:41.580 that got labeled as the year of the gun and it already had been labeled the year of the gun

00:32:47.000 because of the sheer number of murders and shootings that we had that year so i think

00:32:52.340 that particular murder, capping that off, is really what garnered the public's attention.

00:32:58.860 And the subsequent investigation, which took months and months by Savas Kiriakou and Brian

00:33:06.520 Borg and their team, coming to a successful conclusion in court, I think that still attracts

00:33:15.180 the interests of the public, because we still hear about the parole hearings. We still hear about

00:33:21.900 some of these guys getting re-arrested

00:33:25.240 once they're out for other offenses,

00:33:27.380 and it always makes a headline

00:33:29.240 because one of the accused in the Jane Creba murder

00:33:33.080 arrested again for this or that, right?

00:33:36.160 So I think the public will eternally be interested

00:33:40.020 in that case for all of the above reasons.

00:33:45.320 Now, Bruce MacArthur was definitely more of something

00:33:49.660 that happened in the shadows.

00:33:50.720 Josie was living quite openly and was a serial killer.

00:34:00.820 When the serial killer claim was raised, it was said, no, that's not the case.

00:34:07.320 And I know there was a lot of political heat over that.

00:34:10.060 But walk me through what happened.

00:34:12.340 What changed?

00:34:13.100 What was the clue that dropped that made everyone look at it differently and say, okay, there's something here?

00:34:20.720 Well, I think it was never looked at differently by the police and the investigators in the background, but that's something that the public doesn't see and isn't aware of what's going on.

00:34:34.200 So I was pretty heavily involved in that investigation back in 2012, 2013, and I write about it in the book.

00:34:43.060 and when i first became involved we were aware of one missing person and then we very quickly

00:34:49.700 realized well hold on a second we've got three missing persons uh you know from the same area

00:34:54.880 and there's not a person in that project room who isn't thinking in the back of their head

00:35:02.540 could this be a serial killer i mean that's always on the table but that's something you

00:35:08.940 either have to be able to include or exclude in your investigation, and we just didn't have the

00:35:13.420 evidence to include that in the investigation. So the criticism came in 2017, once the

00:35:20.940 investigators had honed in on Bruce MacArthur, and had tied him to two of the missing individuals,

00:35:30.140 and the police chief at the time was asked is there a serial killer and he quite legally

00:35:39.400 correctly said the evidence isn't telling us that's not the case right now uh and

00:35:47.280 couldn't he have said something to the effect of but that's certainly something that we're

00:35:52.420 we're looking into the the possibility of that he could have uh but he didn't and that's where

00:35:58.720 the criticism really came in. But really, even in August, September of 2017, when we first started

00:36:08.980 really digging at Bruce MacArthur, the challenge amongst the investigative team is, are we going

00:36:18.060 to end up with more murder charges than we had against Mark Moore, who, as you know, we charged

00:36:24.260 with four murders back in 2010

00:36:27.640 and who was technically the first serial killer

00:36:30.400 that I investigated.

00:36:31.820 So not something that you can say publicly

00:36:35.320 until you have the evidence,

00:36:37.700 but as the investigation is ongoing,

00:36:39.960 it's certainly something that's always being considered

00:36:42.520 and was considered as early as 2012.

00:36:46.640 You talked earlier about the paperwork

00:36:48.260 and how much time that can take.

00:36:51.160 gathering of evidence in the book you talk about getting all this cctv footage and trying to piece

00:36:59.580 it together how long does a process like that take you're going on and on trying to piece together

00:37:06.620 bits of video here bits of video there i mean we're still seeing that with the barry and honey

00:37:10.740 sherman case all we've got is some bad doorbell you know video how much you describe the grunt

00:37:19.500 work that goes into something like that. Well, if you take the Bruce MacArthur case as a very

00:37:26.080 good example of that, where his last victim, Andrew Kinsman, was killed at the end of June of

00:37:32.100 2017. And the investigators from 51 Division, because it started as a missing persons investigation,

00:37:39.660 actually did a phenomenal job and just said, grab every video camera in this neighborhood for

00:37:45.920 several blocks surrounding Andrew Kinsman's house and just preserve that video. So there's a massive

00:37:51.580 amount of thousands of hours of video surveillance, and it wasn't until mid-August, so a month and a

00:37:58.760 half later, where one of the officers reviewing the video said, this red van circles the neighborhood

00:38:06.460 twice, right around the time that Mr. Kinsman has last heard from. And that just shows you,

00:38:14.720 it's there's artificial intelligence is starting to help a little bit but it's literally officers

00:38:22.420 sitting behind a computer screen watching video and you can't fast forward it uh you know there's

00:38:32.780 no way to go through it more quickly so you're watching it hour for hour as it was captured

00:38:40.200 trying to find a little clue or a little piece of something and something that doesn't quite

00:38:45.780 look crap right yeah it does something that jumps out so and video surveillance i mean when i started

00:38:53.300 in homicide i had a case in 2006 which was a nightclub shooting um and the video for the time

00:39:02.080 was actually very very good it was a multiplex system i believe there are nine cameras uh and

00:39:08.680 And our incident actually takes place from the time the suspects first arrive to the time the murder happens and then they leave is an hour. And I was the one responsible for going through that video. And I spent about five weeks doing nothing but watching that video, trying to pick little things out, trying to find the clues in that video.

00:39:35.920 so and even then uh you know two years later in court i'm in the witness box playing through the

00:39:43.960 video and i noticed something else on the video that i hadn't seen during those five weeks so

00:39:48.660 it's very labor intensive uh there is software available now where you can upload the video and

00:39:55.420 say okay uh find me any footage of somebody wearing a red baseball cap and it'll do that for

00:40:02.880 you right it'll do that it'll do something like that right or find me any video of a of a black

00:40:10.460 honda crv uh driving along the street it it will do that for you but few and far between where that

00:40:17.480 can actually uh be utilized and we launched a video analysis unit back in 2018 we got some

00:40:25.140 additional provincial funding uh and the chief of police at the time mark saunders came to me i was

00:40:31.620 the the inspector in charge of homicide and he said i've got this money what do you want to do

00:40:35.540 with it and i said i want a video analysis unit uh i'm tired of going to the opp and and utilizing

00:40:41.840 their professional video analysts to do the work for our cases so that was the start of the uh of

00:40:49.700 the video analysis unit and they do some great work and they're the ones who are on the forefront

00:40:53.560 now of utilizing that ai to uh to help make going through video a lot easier add into that

00:41:01.360 Brian, the, uh, the body cams that all of the police officers wear and the issues with, uh,

00:41:07.840 the video on those body cams and the, uh, the, the vetting of those body cams for disclosure in

00:41:14.420 court, uh, and the things that those body cams capture mostly good, sometimes bad, uh, about

00:41:21.020 the actions of police officers. And you're adding that into every single case, every single homicide

00:41:26.640 case and the homicide squad has to do all that work to, uh, to go through all that video footage

00:41:31.600 as well. You said that capture is mostly good, sometimes bad. I know police weren't, some

00:41:38.980 officers, some police associations weren't crazy about body cams. Now they love them

00:41:43.580 because it more often than not helps. And, you know, the idea that, well, the body cams will

00:41:50.140 show how awful and corrupt all police officers are hasn't panned out. It's quite often showing

00:41:55.900 the opposite. But it must be a gut punch to you as someone that spent so much time on the force

00:42:04.240 to see something like the recent arrest of, what is it called, Project South?

00:42:13.080 Several officers arrested, talk of corruption, talk of ties to criminal drug dealing gangs,

00:42:19.480 and including all the way down to, you know,

00:42:23.040 the snowboarder, Ryan Wedding.

00:42:30.620 Like, how do officers like you, retired officers,

00:42:34.300 or guys who are still on the force and are clean,

00:42:36.900 how do you react to that without just wanting to scream?

00:42:40.900 Yeah, I mean, there's nothing, you know,

00:42:43.400 that a good cop hates than seeing a bad cop.

00:42:45.860 uh, and obviously the, uh, the corruption charges that we're seeing, and corruption is a pretty

00:42:51.120 broad term. Um, but in this case, the corruption of, of those officers being involved, what they're

00:42:58.540 allegedly involved in, uh, it, it does really, really make you want to scream, uh, and hang

00:43:06.520 your head. It's embarrassing for retired officers. It's embarrassing for current officers, you know,

00:43:12.720 The vast majority of police officers, and as we've said a thousand times, are good, hardworking people with the right intentions.

00:43:23.700 And my book, The Dedication at the Beginning, is to the well-intentioned police officers in the city of Toronto.

00:43:30.720 But there are police officers who are using their job for ill-gotten gains, and that should absolutely never be tolerated, and there should be more mechanisms in place to stop the abuse.

00:43:47.220 We've seen it time and time again since the day I joined the job, the abuse of the databases, and now the leaking of information from those databases to criminal organizations.

00:44:03.300 Surely we can do more to stem this and stop this, and we'll see where the Inspector General's review lands as far as recommendations for that.

00:44:14.740 But it just makes you sick to your stomach when you see that going on with police officers.

00:44:22.760 It makes the good police officers' jobs that much more difficult.

00:44:28.180 We'll end on this.

00:44:31.560 We recently had a shooting at a street festival in Toronto.

00:44:39.980 And there are now calls to say we should have checkpoints.

00:44:44.740 at street festivals so that police can stop guys with guns from coming to the street festival.

00:44:51.380 Is that realistic? Or are we just trying to police our way out of the fact that

00:44:56.880 these guys went to the street festival looking for trouble and for each other?

00:45:02.900 You know, we've got a big problem. And I don't think you can stand there

00:45:07.800 on a weekend where there were three mass shootings

00:45:13.660 and say, it's a safe city and we have to put up with this.

00:45:16.720 This is just what happens in a large city.

00:45:20.760 Well, the one guy, so yeah,

00:45:22.900 the Salsa Street Festival gets all the attention,

00:45:27.160 but what a lot of people don't realize

00:45:29.120 is there was another shooting at a nightclub, Rebel,

00:45:32.300 that same day, later,

00:45:34.500 and the guy who was charged with that

00:45:38.600 was awaiting sentencing on a brutal,

00:45:43.320 what was it, he kidnapped somebody

00:45:45.720 and brutally assaulted them.

00:45:47.540 He's waiting sentencing 1.00

00:45:48.660 and he's out shooting people.

00:45:51.880 Yeah, and the night before,

00:45:53.240 Salsa in St. Clair, 0.95

00:45:54.420 there was a shooting up at Jane Shepard

00:45:56.160 where a young man lost his life

00:45:57.720 and two more people were injured by the gunfire.

00:46:01.000 And like I said, technically,

00:46:02.240 that's a mass shooting as well.

00:46:04.500 And you've got those three mass shootings and the talk is we need to establish checkpoints and sad that we have to even think about that.

00:46:14.340 But, you know, consider what we're already doing, Brian, when it comes to some of these street festivals.

00:46:20.640 and i see it uh when i go to these street festivals and we now have these uh temporary

00:46:28.000 vehicle mitigation blockades at the uh at the entrances to all these festivals and i just look

00:46:36.140 at those and i shake my head and i think how sad that we've gotten to this point where we have to

00:46:40.400 do that we have to protect the festival from somebody ramming their car through a bunch of

00:46:44.660 pedestrians at a festival. And we saw this, uh, you know, you could even make a, uh, an analogy

00:46:51.700 between the Jane Kriba case in, in 2005. We can certainly make an analogy between the 2018, uh,

00:46:59.200 Danforth shootings and what happened here, uh, you know, eight years later and sorry, not eight

00:47:07.120 years later it's uh yeah eight years later yeah eight years um and wonder okay what if what are

00:47:14.940 we doing about this and we can blame the americans all we want for the illegal gun trade but we're

00:47:20.900 the ones who have created the market for those guns right the americans wouldn't be uh smuggling

00:47:26.860 guns up here canadians wouldn't be smuggling guns up here if we didn't have the market for it so i

00:47:32.180 think we really have to quash that market. We have to make the repercussions for possession of

00:47:37.200 firearms, uh, so severe that people simply don't want to carry firearms. They, they don't want to

00:47:42.760 risk that charge. They don't want to go to jail. Uh, and that's where we have to focus the efforts

00:47:51.880 and we have to focus the efforts at the borders to stop them from coming over. And that's, that's

00:47:56.920 going to be a tough thing to do. I remember talking to former Ottawa Police Chief Chuck

00:48:02.320 Bordelow about eight years ago, and he was describing to me the rise in gun violence in

00:48:09.420 Ottawa, which it's not as bad as Toronto, but it's worse than it used to be. And he said,

00:48:15.220 due to things like fentanyl, he said the gangs that used to just settle things with a knife or

00:48:20.240 a beating, they reach for their guns. Everyone's armed up. Everyone's armed up, and we didn't

00:48:26.420 seen that 35 years ago, you know, when I was policing the streets of 14 division, where

00:48:31.100 if a gun was, was seized in the city of Toronto, all the police officers who were working,

00:48:36.420 uh, I remember I was working in 14 division and we, we got a guy with a gun and police officers

00:48:43.480 from Scarborough drove down to see it. They had never seen one on the street. Right. So, and you

00:48:48.320 look fast forward now to where the Toronto police are literally seizing about a dozen guns, crime

00:48:54.600 guns every single week on the streets of Toronto. So do we close off access to these festivals with

00:49:04.060 the checkpoint? I think there's other tools that we could use that would be a lot more effective

00:49:11.100 without creating that fear amongst legitimate festival goers. But I also look at what happened

00:49:18.860 with FIFA, uh, in over the last several weeks where we had very few incidents because access

00:49:26.620 to the fan fest and access to exhibition place were, uh, were controlled and, uh, and certainly

00:49:33.760 access to the stadium was controlled. So pretty sad that we have to live like that. But like I

00:49:39.100 said, I think we've, we've dug ourselves a pretty big hole, uh, from all aspects from, uh, the

00:49:45.740 actual punishment for possession of firearms to our our parole system uh in in corrections and

00:49:52.700 even uh you know the the uh the border situation with uh allowing these porous borders uh to allow

00:50:00.540 these these weapons to come in in the first place all right hank thanks for the time today and thanks

00:50:06.060 for the book and the stories uh encourage everyone to go out and grab a copy of the high road

00:50:11.260 confessions of a homicide cop really appreciate it brian thanks for your time full comment is a

00:50:16.280 post-media podcast my name's brian lily your host this episode was produced by andre prue

00:50:20.920 theme music by bryce hall kevin libman is the executive producer make sure that you hit the

00:50:25.780 subscribe button share this on social media and tell your friends about us thanks so much for

00:50:30.120 listening until next time i'm brian lily here's that clip from canada did what season two that

00:50:39.640 we promised for you. In the wake of any major national tragedy, it's natural to start questioning

00:50:44.940 how it could have been foreseen and prevented. But with the Air India bombing, it's the reverse.

00:50:49.940 It's still hard to parse through the details of the plot and know that it wasn't prevented. 0.58

00:50:54.700 I mentioned earlier that intelligence officials knew well ahead of time that Sikh extremists were 0.91

00:50:59.080 trying to blow up an airplane. Well, what if I told you that it was even more specific than that?

00:51:05.500 Air India believed they were the intended target

00:51:07.980 and had even requested extra security for the specific aircraft

00:51:12.140 that ended up blowing apart off the coast of Ireland.

00:51:15.320 Rescuers were still pulling bodies out of the ocean

00:51:17.700 when Canada's then Transport Minister, Don Mazinkowski,

00:51:21.560 had to admit that Air India Flight 182 had taken off from an airport

00:51:24.920 that had extra police on hand for the explicit purpose

00:51:28.180 of stopping any Air India planes from blowing up.

00:51:31.680 Incredibly, luggage had actually been pulled off Air India Flight 182 due to fears it was a security risk.

00:51:38.320 At virtually the exact moment that law enforcement was opening the bags under secure conditions,

00:51:43.280 only to find they'd saved the plane from harmless electronics like clothes, irons and radios,

00:51:48.380 the Emperor Kanishka was being blown up by the suitcase bomb they had missed.

00:51:52.380 They weren't supposed to check your bags in for a flight that you didn't have a confirmed reservation on, right?

00:52:00.200 And that's what happened with two bags on June 22nd, 1985 at Vancouver Airport.

00:52:07.920 So these guys who were checking them in were very persistent and, you know, they got them

00:52:14.100 through, right?

00:52:15.020 They kind of hassled the agent right at the counter.

00:52:18.860 Now, the other big thing was in both cases, the passenger who was listed on the manifest

00:52:26.920 with the connecting flight, which were then Canadian Air, you know, Canadian Pacific Airlines,

00:52:31.940 which people don't even know what it is anymore because it no longer exists. But the both of the

00:52:36.360 bags were checked into CP Air flights that were destined to land and connect with Air India flights.

00:52:42.200 So it was, you know, I can imagine there were people that flew on the CP Air flight from

00:52:46.020 Vancouver to Tokyo and from Vancouver to Toronto who learned afterwards they had a bomb on their

00:52:50.820 plane. Can you imagine what that would do to you? If you want to hear the rest of the story,

00:52:56.480 Make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What everywhere you get your podcasts.

Full Comment - July 27, 2026

A veteran cop explains what’s really happening inside Canadian policing

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