For the past few years, Toronto's police chief has painted a picture of a city growing more violent by the moment -- a place where residents wander the streets at their own peril. His squad's clearance rate on homicide cases has plummeted to historic lows, hovering barely above 50%. Under his watch, the force has been beset by its biggest corruption scandal in memory, and its relationship with certain ethnic communities has taken a significant turn for the worse. And recently, the city's police union withdrew its support for him.
Sounds like an ideal candidate for a "save the chief" campaign, don't you think?
At least a few people evidently did. In fact, they didn't just think Julian Fantino might make a worthy cause; they thought he'd make the worthy cause upon which to build their budding political careers.
Nobody ever accused the cadre of city councillors who've rallied around the chief of being masterful political strategists. This group's buffoonish, self-appointed leader, after all, is New Democrat-turned-conservative Giorgio Mammoliti, who once protested a local nude beach by ripping off his shirt in the middle of a council meeting.
Still, the councillors' decision to seize on Mr. Fantino's dismissal wasn't entirely out of left field. Since being elected last year, Mayor David Miller has enjoyed such an extended honeymoon that he's already starting to look like a shoo-in for re-election in 2006. A lot could change between now and then, of course, but the problem facing the anti-Miller crowd is a severe lack of galvanizing issues at the local level. So when the Mayor was rumoured to have meddled in the local police board's decision not to renew an apparently popular police chief's contract, a collection of hostile councillors saw an open door.
They've created an uproar at council meetings. They've organized protests. They've attempted to rally local organizations, and penned newspaper op-eds. And yet for all the noise they've made, it's mostly fallen on deaf ears.
Outside the Toronto Sun, which jumped so hard onto the Save-the-Chief bandwagon that it felt compelled to run a cartoon comparing Mr. Miller to Hitler, hardly anybody seems particularly engaged. Whereas a similar bid to keep former chief Bill McCormack nearly a decade ago elicited a legitimately impassioned show of support, a liberal estimate of the turnout at the "rally" on Mr. Fantino's behalf pegged it at 200.
Only in the local Italian community has the issue shown much traction. And because that demographic has largely migrated to neighbouring Vaughan, where Mr. Fantino lives, it's not doing him much good now -- although it may come in handy if, as rumoured, he runs for the provincial Conservatives there in the next election.
To some extent, the chief's supporters may be the victims of timing. After a federal election, politicked-out Torontonians are busy enjoying summer and have better things to do than immerse themselves in a local power struggle.
Still, it's a bit surprising that the dismissal of someone who, at least until recently, was attracting strong approval ratings has been greeted with such a shrug.
The rash of scandals surrounding the city's 52 Division, which saw 55 Police Services Act charges laid against nine officers earlier this month, has undoubtedly taken its toll. On one hand, the public is inclined to associate various bad deeds with whoever's in charge, even if Mr. Fantino had nothing to do with them; on the other, the police union blames him for taking a hard line.
Mr. Fantino's bigger problem, though, may be of his own making.
In a bid for more public funding and tougher criminal laws, the chief has routinely used over-inflated rhetoric to create the distinct -- and false -- impression that criminals are wreaking increasing havoc across Toronto with little consequence. "Violent crime is up, it's been up, it's been going up for years, and now we're seeing an explosion of guns and violence and we're coping with it," he said late last year, warning that the city was in danger of heading toward "anarchy."
The reality is that violent crime is not up: It declined 7% from 2001 to 2002, and early numbers show it remaining relatively unchanged last year. The city's homicide rate, one of the lowest in Canada, has remained steady. And whereas overall crime rates rose across most of the country in 2003, Toronto's remained almost exactly the same.
But by helping create a false impression that the city has gone to hell in a handbasket under his watch, Mr. Fantino has hardly made a compelling case for his own reappointment. Throw in his confrontational disposition, rightly or wrongly associated with his force's difficulty in working with the city's Caribbean communities, and another five years doesn't seem all that appealing.
Mr. Fantino may well have a bright future ahead of him in politics or elsewhere. By all appearances, he doesn't seem particularly distraught over his own dismissal. But those who pinned their political futures on helping him keep his job may have more cause for disappointment.
