Matt Gurney: The police have given up. They've surrendered

And their best advice to you is to do the same, if you know what's good for you.

The motto is in need of an update.

By: Matt Gurney

The message from the Toronto Police Service couldn't be clearer: we surrender, and you, the peace-loving, law-abiding citizens, should surrender, too.

For your own safety.

Regular Line readers will know — hell, anyone who pays any attention at all to the news will know — that auto thefts have been surging in this country, relative to recent years (yes, yes, I know — they haven’t yet gone past historic levels). It's particularly bad right now in my hometown. The issue has finally percolated up into the public consciousness enough that it's become a political issue. We're getting new task forces and all that jazz — the kinds of things politicians announce when they realize, always belatedly, that they have to announce something. But while those announcements are made and repeated and recycled, thus giving the politicians their coveted ass-covering material, the thefts are continuing.

And the Toronto Police have reflected on the problem. They've mulled it over. Thought long and hard. And they're advising people just give up. To stay safe.

This advice came out at a community safety meeting between Toronto Police officials and concerned citizens last month. (The meeting was covered by City News Toronto, but didn't get widespread coverage until this week, when clips went viral online. Tell me that isn't a microcosm of the 21 century.) In remarks to the citizens at the meeting, a Toronto police constable said this: “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs by your front door. Because they’re breaking into your homes to steal your car. They don’t want anything else. A lot of them that [the police] are arresting have guns on them. And they’re not toy guns. They’re real guns. They’re loaded.”

Oh. Okay.

Look, it's not bad advice, in any individual circumstance. There probably are a lot of people out there who'd be relieved if someone kicked in their door, grabbed the fob and took off. And it's certainly not novel advice from a police service. We've all heard variations of this before, right? "Just give up your wallet" when you're mugged. "Just get out of the car" during a carjacking. You can always replace things. Right?

The problem is that, in the other scenarios above, you're out and about in public. There's no guarantee of safety in public, as much as we all wish otherwise. The advice now being given by Toronto police isn't what to do when someone jabs a gun into your ribs in a seedy back alley, but how to avoid being harmed by bad guys in your own home. And the police advice is "Make it so easy on them that they have no reason to hurt you."

There's no charitable read on this, and in this case, truth isn't a defence. I accept that the police are giving their real, best, true advice. I accept that they are being sincere. That's the problem: the police are sincerely surrendering. They've given up, and they think it would be best if you gave up, too. These violent robberies are just going to continue, and it’s on us — the public — to minimize the bloodshed and risk to ourselves by … submitting.

I try to avoid hyperbole in columns, with the odd exception for comic effect. But this isn't funny at all, so I won't make a joke of it. Let's be extremely serious for a moment. If this is where the Toronto Police Service has landed in terms of their best advice for the public, as a member of that public and Toronto resident, I'd like to ask this: why stop with leaving my fob by the front door? I have a laptop computer. It's a few years old now, but still in workable condition. It’s worth a few hundred bucks. Maybe I should leave that by the door, too? I don't keep a lot of cash on hand — who the hell does, in 2024? — but there's usually a few bucks in my wallet, or my wife's. Should part of our nightly routine now just be emptying our wallets into a little bowl that we can leave on the radiator by the front door, and come morning, if the door hasn't been kicked down and the cash grabbed, we can just put the money right back into our wallets as we get the day started? I'm not really a jewelry guy, but my wedding band is worth something, I guess. Pop that into the bowl with the cash?

After all, the bad guys have guns. Real guns. Loaded guns. And there is apparently nothing to be done about this except submit and co-operate. So say the police.

You know what? Let's just jump right to the end point of the logical progression here. Every item of conceivable value in my home that can be removed by anything less than a forklift or a moving crew goes into a big box at sundown, and we just put it out on the front steps. I’ll put my credit cards and debit card into a little Ziplock and tuck a note with the PINs inside. The armed bad guys can just come, grab the box itself, and be off with it. That way they don't have any reason to even kick down the door. Replacing a front door is a hassle, after all. Why not just cut out that step entirely by leaving all items of value outside? Anything that doesn't get stolen overnight, we just grab the box in the morning and bring it back inside. My ring goes back onto my finger, my cash and cards back into my wallet, and it’s time for tea.

I wish this was a joke, and it's obviously a bit of that usually avoided hyperbole, but this is the natural endpoint for the kind of logic that is now apparently guiding the best and brightest over at Toronto Police HQ. The police don't have any expectation that they're going to stop the bad guys, and you might get hurt if you try and stop the bad guys, so let’s not try. Let the bad guys have your stuff, no questions asked. It's your best chance to avoid injury.

Like I said above, folks, it's not that I don't take the police at their word. It's that I do take the police at their word. That's the problem.

And it's a problem that doesn't exist in isolation. Ever since the new war started in the Middle East, and going back even further to rail blockades and the convoy crisis of 2022, Canadians have been presented, again and again, with evidence that their police are incapable of maintaining public order, of deterring and preventing crimes committed in full view of the public, and frankly, don't even seem all that interested in trying. The police appear to truly believe that actually stopping crime isn't their job. It's their job to investigate it after the fact, at best, and hopefully make some arrests later. Actually intervening against the crimes in progress is too old-school and unsophisticated. It isn’t fancy enough for our evolved sensibilities.

After all, it could provoke a confrontation! Remember: the bad guys have guns.

Well, gosh. Check and mate, Canadian public.

If there's any consolation, it's that it ain't just the normal people the police are giving up on. Just a few weekends ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to skip out on a dinner gala in company with the visiting Italian PM because the police couldn't secure the venue against those protesting the Gaza War. The best they could do was escort a cabinet minister to safety, and even that seemed touch-and-go. So it's not that the police are playing favourites, per se. They're being admirably consistent and fair: they can't secure anything. They can't protect anyone. This is the truest form of equality, I suppose. We’re all on our own.

Fair enough. Let's take our law enforcement officials at their word, at least insofar as this: the police don't think they can protect you, and they're not really going to try.

Here’s the problem, though. I don't know if that's going to play out exactly as the police think it will. This seems more like a recipe for some would-be car thief getting blown in half with a 12-gauge shotgun than it does a compliant population. 

I'll be accused of hoping for that outcome for even having mentioned it. Far from it. I think that's about the worst thing that could possibly happen. The homeowner defending themselves or their property would probably end up being just about the only person the Toronto police would exercise any haste in arresting. The shooter would have the book thrown at him by courts looking to “set an example” against “lawlessness” and “vigilante justice.” He'd be locked up faster and longer than any of the guys kicking down doors. That is, after all, the Canadian way. And such a shooting would almost certainly increase the level of violence used by the thieves coming for the vehicles, as the thieves decide to come in heavy and shoot first.

So yeah. I’m not hoping for this. But we’ll be lucky to avoid it. A broadly shared sense of personal safety and security is the absolute bedrock precondition for any functioning civil society. And where that sense of security doesn’t exist or has been lost, people don’t stack their valuables by the door. They do other things. They form neighbourhood watches or patrols. They establish justice systems along tribal lines, or religious ones. They build walls around their communities, and/or throw their lot in with any strongman with some hired muscle and gumption. Or you count on the king to send in the army when the bandits get too close to the villages.

That is the lesson of history. It took us until about two centuries ago to figure out the concept of professional civilian police and neutral courts, and it seems to have gone out of fashion already.

We don’t think about any of this much in Canada because we’ve had it so long we’ve forgotten that security isn’t the default norm of human existence — it’s actually rather the opposite. That’s why every society throughout history has devoted time and energy to public order — not always justice, I stress, but safety. We’ve done a fairly good job of that in Canada over the years. So good a job that it seems like we’ve just come to accept that is how things naturally are supposed to be, instead of something we built with hard work, strong institutions and sustained effort.

Oops.

So here we are. Our official police policy is now to wave the white flag and hope for the best. And if that doesn’t work, the day after some would-be thief gets blown away by a pissed-off homeowner on his third Wrangler, the Toronto police will adjust their advice. We’ll likely then be told to just leave your car on, idling in your driveway, facing the street, with the driver's door open. And keep the gas tank or batteries topped up, too. That will be the new only way to stay safe. From the bad guys with the loaded guns.

It would be better if we had law enforcement agencies that remembered that part of their job is maintaining peace and public order, not just filling out data for insurance forms. It would be nice if we had a political class that was willing to assert itself over the police forces they are responsible for, instead of hiding behind the convenient fib that politicians can never interfere with policing matters. It would be nice if Canada's weird domestic politics didn't make it so awkward for us to acknowledge that the Port of Montreal is a problem that we should fix, and would fix, if every level of government involved didn't know how, uh, awkward that could get. It would be nice if our cars weren't designed in ways that seemed almost intended to make stealing them as easy as possible.

All those things would be dandy, indeed. But we don't have any of that, so we're left with this: the Toronto police have surrendered. And they want you to surrender, too, and if you will — if you know whats good for you. So leave those fobs by the door, citizens. And maybe hang a white flag out over the stoop while you’re at it.

UPDATE, March 15, 2024: As noted at the start of this column, this was all driven by a public meeting in February. The meeting was reported on at the time, but went largely unnoticed until clips went viral this week. Between when I began working on this column and when I published it, the Toronto Police Service released a curious statement. I’ll save my comments on it for the weekend dispatch, but suffice it to say, if I had seen the statement before I’d published it, I would have noted it in the column. It wouldn’t have changed anything in the column, but fairness would have demanded at least a mention. Consider this that mention. - MG

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