It is hard to know sometimes, when police Chief Mark Saunders opens his mouth to make public statements, what might be running through his mind. Like this week, regarding a group of people who are alienated and grieving and traumatized, did he consciously look around for salt he could use to tend to their wounds? Or was insulting the injured here more a byproduct of some instinct to try to throw blame away from himself?

Either way, the headline on the front page of Tuesday’s Globe and Mail, “Toronto police chief says civilians failed to help investigation into alleged serial killer,” seems a pretty unexpected and misplaced kick at the gay community around Church and Wellesley.

In the story, he says dealing with an alleged serial killer isn’t something his force has much experience with, and says that since the arrest of Bruce McArthur in a series of at least six murders, information has been discovered that might have helped catch the alleged killer earlier if it had been known by the police. “We knew that people were missing and we didn’t have the right answers,” he is quoted as saying, among other things. “But nobody was coming to us with anything.”

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It certainly sounds like he’s placing the blame for this alleged killer’s horrifying crimes, and the Toronto Police Service’s failure to catch him earlier, at least partly on the very community McArthur is accused of victimizing.

What the hell is he thinking? I don’t know if he has some specific people (“people who knew him very well”) in mind when he talks about a failure to co-operate. Accomplices, or friends who should have been more suspicious, or something. Who knows what he’s referring to?

It’s pretty clear, however, what he can’t possibly be referring to. He can’t be referring to how, for years, people in the gay community feared there might be a serial killer preying on their community, and circulated information about that fear, while the police insisted they could find no connection between the missing persons cases involved.

How members of that community wrote and talked about their suspicions for years in the queer and alternative press.

Chief Saunders can’t have been referring to how Sasha Reid, a U of T researcher who studies serial killers, reached out to the police force in the summer of 2017 to tell them she thought data analysis of missing persons cases showed there was a serial killer operating. Back then, Reid offered to share a profile of the person they should be looking for (one that seems to match McArthur in many particulars, though not all of them) and share data analysis, she told the Star’s Vjosa Isai. At the time, police basically said thanks, we’ll call you if we need you. And then never did call her.

The chief can’t have been referring to how in December 2017, as the Star reported, when members of the LGBT community expressed their great fear that a serial killer was preying on their community and organized safe-walk programs and community meetings to talk about it, Saunders took the time to hold a press conference in which he and his detectives “dispelled rumours of a serial killer in the village.” There was no evidence, Saunders’ spokesman stressed, that any of the cases were linked. “There is no evidence that a serial killer is responsible for the disappearance of any of the missing males,” one detective said then, and no evidence many of the missing people had even been victims of foul play at all.

I mean all this time, you had citizens, members of the community, telling the police directly that they should be looking for a serial killer — and according to the police, offering hundreds of tips and leads and pieces of information. And you had the police, including Chief Saunders personally, telling the community that their fears seemed unfounded.

And now that it turns out that there was, it seems, a serial killer operating all those years, and the police have arrested a suspect, you have the chief saying his force “knew something was up,” but that “nobody was coming to us with anything.”

This guy. I don’t know, people.

John Tory defended him, as he has been in the habit of doing, saying the chief didn’t mean what he appeared to say. “I just want to make it very clear, as mayor, that there is no one who is suggesting any blame belongs on victims of horrific crimes, that we are all grieving as a city with the LGBTQ and Church-Wellesley community generally,” he told reporters Tuesday morning.

It’s not clear why Tory thought he had such a handle on what Saunders meant, since by the end of the business day Tuesday, after activists and politicians spent the entire day demanding the chief clarify his comments if indeed he had failed to make himself understood, he had not publicly done so.

Tuesday evening, Saunders did address the comments in an interview with CP24. The chief denied he blamed the LGBTQ community, and said his comments referred to a wide variety of investigations.

He said if his comments to the Globe were “misconstrued or taken in the wrong context, then I definitely apologize for that.”

Still, even allowing for possible mitigating contextualization and misunderstandings, this is a situation where the words as Saunders spoke them aggravate an already difficult relationship. For some reasons — possibly understandable ones, investigations are not easy — the police failed to protect a community. A community with which they already have a historically strained relationship, as he acknowledged in his interview with the Globe, and a relationship that has only become more strained in the time Saunders has been chief. (Recall, if you want, the Pride debate of last summer.)

Chief Saunders has never been a strong communicator. In almost three years on the job, he doesn’t appear to have gotten much better at that element of the job.

In that time, he seems to have aggravated the department’s relations with the Black community through his defence of the carding program and his refusal to meet with Black Lives Matter protesters.

Meanwhile, he seems also to have damaged his own relationship with the union that represents his officers, the Toronto Police Association. When he was appointed to this job (over fellow perceived front-running candidate Peter Sloly), it was widely said that Saunders had been the union’s choice for chief. Last week, that union publicized a “non-confidence vote” in Saunders over his handling of modernization and budget-cutting matters.

Even something as simple as the colour of police cars has been a source of controversy.

And now, another set of ill-conceived comments, further alienating another constituency in a way that aggravates the pain and fear and grief already afflicting that community.

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As I say, it’s hard to know, sometimes, what Chief Saunders is thinking. Hard to know what Mayor Tory is thinking in constantly defending him. Hard to know if Saunders is ever going to get better at managing the communications — listening and talking both — with various constituencies his job requires. That’s not good. It’s an urgently important part of an urgently important job.

“If there are things that we can do to increase relationship, if there are things to be operationally better, I’m willing to hear that,” Saunders said in the Globe interview.

Yeah, chief, there are things. If you’re willing to hear, just start listening.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire