The Canadian police misconduct thread

[Guy Profumo]

(didn't I start this one earlier?)

Anyway
Toronto police fail to investigate serial killer due to bigotry and homophobia

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/w...-mcarthur.html

Just imagine if a British territorial police force failed to investigate a serial killer properly if, say, the victims were mainly sex-workers for example?

[Balderdasha]

A similar thing happened in the UK with Stephen Port between 2014-2016: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Port

Police ignored very obvious clues because the victims were gay young men.

[WOM]

Yeah, the most relevant bit of that is right near the end. Police didn't really pull their thumb out until Andrew Kinsman - a 'respectable' white member of the community - went missing and his friends advocated strongly that something bad had happened. His investigation led quickly to McArthur and the whole thing unraveling.

The others (8 total) were mainly South Asian men, but in some cases were not reported missing or their families hadn't known they were gay, so their disappearances weren't connected by police. One of the eight was homeless and wasn't reported missing and one was under a deportation order, so was thought to be 'in the wind' and not missing at all.

But yeah, a failure overall. McArthur should have been flagged up way earlier. His name was everywhere, but obvious connections were missed. Having followed this pretty closely as it unfolded, I don't know if I'd weight the homophobic angle as heavily as this article does, but I'd be curious to read the report and see if it reflects that.

[WOM]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toron...lice-1.5986451

The CBC's article is more in line with my overall opinion, which is that it was just a lot of really lazy, sloppy police work. How much of that was informed by homophobia is tough to say. This is the same force that failed to turn up the dead body of a white woman laying in an alleyway until her own mother rolled up and found it the next day. And which gunned down an unarmed mentally ill man that it had surrounded and pinned into a trolley car. So...