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History

Creation to 1859 reforms

The Toronto Police Service, was founded in 1834 when the city of Toronto was first created from the town of York. (Prior to that, local able-bodied male citizens were required to report for night duty as special constables for a fixed number of nights a year on the pain of fine or imprisonment in a system known as “watch and ward”.)

The Toronto Police is one of the English-speaking world oldest modern municipal police departments; older than, for example, the legendary New York City Police Department which was formed in 1845 or the Boston Police Department which was established in 1839. The London Metropolitan Police of 1829 is generally recognized as the first modern municipal department. In 1835, Toronto retained five fulltime constables ratio of about one officer for every 1,850 citizens. Their daily pay was set at 5 shillings for day duty and 7 shillings, 6 pence, for night duty. In 1837 the constables annual pay was fixed at 75 per annum, a lucrative city position when compared to the mayor annual pay of 250 at the time.

Toronto constables circa 1880

From 1834 to 1859, the Toronto Police was a corrupt and notoriously political force with its constables loyal to the local aldermen who personally appointed police officers in their own wards for the duration of their incumbency. Toronto constables on numerous occasions suppressed opposition candidate meetings and took sides during bitter sectarian violence between Orange Order and Irish Catholic radical factions in the city. A provincial government report in 1841 described the Toronto Police as “formidable engines of oppression”. Although constables were issued uniforms in 1837, one contemporary recalled that the Toronto Police was “without uniformity, except in one respecthey were uniformly slovenly.” After an excessive outbreak of street violence involving Toronto Police misconduct, including an episode where constables brawled with Toronto’s firemen in one incident, and stood by doing nothing in another incident while enraged firemen burned down a visiting circus when its clowns jumped a lineup at a local brothel, the entire Toronto Police force, along with its chief, were fired in 1859.

1859 to 1900

The new force was removed from Toronto City Council jurisdiction (except for the setting of the annual budget and manpower levels) and placed under the control of a provincially mandated Board of Police Commissioners. Under its new Chief, William Stratton Prince, a former infantry captain, standardized training, hiring practices and new strict rules of discipline and professional conduct were introduced. Today’s Toronto Police Service directly traces its ethos, constitutional lineage and Police Commission regulatory structure to the 1859 reforms.

In the 19th century, the Toronto Police mostly focused on the suppression of rebellion in the cityarticularly during the Fenian threats of 1860 to 1870. The Toronto Police were probably Canada’s first security intelligence agency when they established a network of spies and informants throughout Canada West in 1864 to combat US Army recruiting agents attempting to induce British Army soldiers stationed in Canada to desert to serve in the Union Army in the Civil War. The Toronto Police operatives later turned to spying on the activities of the Fenians and filed reports to the Chief from as far as Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago and New York City. When in December 1864, the Canada West secret frontier police was established under Stipendiary Magistrate Gilbert McMicken, some of the Toronto Police agents were reassigned to this new agency.

In 1863, the Toronto Police were also used as “Indian fighters” during the Manitoulin Island Incident when some fifty natives armed with knives forced the fishery inspector William Gibbard and a fishery operation to withdraw from unceded tribal lands on Lake Huron. Thirteen armed Toronto police officers, along with constables from Barrie, were dispatched to Manitoulin Island to assist the government in retaking the fishery operation, but were forced back when the natives advanced now armed with rifles. The police withdrew but were later reinforced and eventually arrested the entire band but not before William Gibbard was killed by unknown parties. (Sidney L. Harring White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence Toronto: Osgood Society-University of Toronto Press, 1998. pp. 152-153)

In the 1870s, as the Fenian threat began to gradually wane and the Victorian moral reform movement gained momentum, Toronto police primarily functioned in the role of “urban missionaries” whose function it was to regulate unruly and immoral behaviour among the “lower classes”. They were almost entirely focused on arresting drunks, prostitutes, disorderlies, and violators of Toronto ultra-strict Sunday “blue law”.

In the days before public social services, the force functioned as a social services mega-agency. Prior the creation of the Toronto Humane Society in 1887 and the Children Aid Society in 1891, the police oversaw animal and child welfare, including the enforcement of child support payments. They operated the city’s ambulance service and acted as the Board of Health. Police stations at the time were designed with space for the housing of homeless, as no other public agency in Toronto dealt with this problem. Shortly before the Great Depression, in 1925, the Toronto Police housed 16,500 homeless people that year.

Plainclothes officers circa 1919

The Toronto Police regulated street-level business: cab drivers, street vendors, corner grocers, tradesmen, rag men, junk dealers, laundry operators. Under public order provisions, the Toronto Police was responsible for the licensing and regulation of dance halls, pool halls, theatres, and later movie houses. It was responsible for censoring the content of not only theatrical performances and movies, but of all literature in the city ranging from books and magazines to posters and advertising.

The Toronto Police also suppressed labour movements which were perceived as anarchist threats. The establishment of the mounted unit is directly related to the four-month Toronto streetcar strike of 1886, when authorities called on the Governor General’s Horse Guard Regiment to assist in suppressing the strike.

20th century

A yellow former Metro Toronto Police car makes an appearance during a parade.

As for serious criminal investigations, the Toronto Police frequently (but not always) contracted with private investigators from the Pinkerton Detective Agency until the 20th century when it developed its own internal investigation and intelligence capacity.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Toronto Police under Chief Dennis “Deny” Draper, a retired Brigadier General and former Conservative candidate, returned to its function as an agency to suppress political dissent. Its notorious “Red Squad” brutally dispersed demonstrations by labour unions and by unemployed and homeless people during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Suspicious of “foreigners”, the police lobbied the city of Toronto to pass legislation banning public speeches in languages other than English, curtailing union organization among Toronto’s vast immigrant populations working in sweat shops.

After several scandals, including a call by Chief Draper to have reporters “shot” and his being arrested driving drunk, the city appointed in 1948 a new Police Chief from its own ranks for the first time in the department’s history: John Chisholm, a very able senior police inspector. In 1955, the Metropolitan Toronto Board of Police Commissioners was formed in preparation for the amalgamation of the 13 police forces in the municipality Metropolitan Toronto into a unified police force with Chisholm as chief of the unified force. Unfortunately Chisholm was not up to the politics of the Chief’s office, especially in facing off with Fred “Big Daddy” Gardiner who engineered almost single-handedly the formation of Metropolitan Toronto in the 1950s. As the Toronto City Police absorbed the surrounding police departments and grew in size and complexity, Chisholm found himself unable to manage the huge agency and its Byzantine politics. In 1958, after a number of conflicts with Gardiner and members of the newly expanded Metropolitan Toronto Board of Police Commissioners, Chief Chisholm drove to High Park on the city’s west end, parked his car and committed suicide with his service revolver. The late Staff Superintendent Jack Webster, one of the officers who arrived at the scene of the Chief’s death and who would upon his retirement in the 1990s become the Force Historian at the Toronto Police Museum, would later write, “Suicide is a constant partner in every police car.”

With the creation of Metro Toronto in 1954, the Toronto Police was eventually merged on January 1, 1957, with the other municipal forces to form the Metropolitan Toronto Police Force:

Former Police Force

Current Community

Field

Division(s)

Scarborough Police Department

Scarborough

Area

41, 42, 43

Etobicoke Police Department

Etobicoke

Area