Toronto police chief Mark Saunders is staying on as top cop of Canada’s largest municipal police service for another year, the police board announced Tuesday.

“I am pleased to confirm that the Board and I have agreed to extend my mandate as Chief of the Toronto Police Service, a role that I am honoured to hold,” Saunders tweeted Tuesday morning. “It is a privilege to lead the Toronto Police Service and I am humbled to be continuing.”

The extension of Saunders’ contract means he will stay in his role until April 30, 2021, after his sixth year in the high-profile and closely scrutinized position.

According to the Toronto police board, this is only the second time in the last 40 years a chief will have served more than one term. Saunders’ predecessor Bill Blair, now Canada’s minister of border security and organized crime reduction, also had his term extended — by five years to a total of 10.

Saunders was chosen as police chief in April 2015 and took on a force facing a ballooning $1-billion budget and waning public trust. Alongside the board, the force has since taken on an ambitious modernization effort aimed at cutting costs and “redefining” policing — a plan that has encountered multiple setbacks.

Chief among them: a return this year to a police budget greater than $1 billion — the city’s biggest line item — after a three-year period of reduced spending.

In a joint statement Tuesday, both police board chair Andy Pringle and Mayor John Tory, who sits on the seven-member civilian board, expressed support for Saunders.

“I think it’s going to give him a great chance to finish a lot of this work on modernization, to keep at some of the very real challenges we face now,” Tory said in an interview Tuesday.

Though he said the force’s modernization plan is a “work in progress,” Tory said there were examples of progress, including the ongoing neighbourhood officer plan seeking to build community relationships and the connected officer program, which frees up time by reducing paperwork and moving tasks online.

But Saunders’ one-year extension is “not a ringing endorsement,” said Alok Mukherjee, the former longtime chair of the Toronto police board who was at the helm when Saunders was unanimously chosen in 2015.

“To not have given him some extension would have raised questions about whether that signified that the board was not satisfied with his performance, which then, in turn, would raise questions about the board’s judgment in appointing him in the first place,” Mukherjee said.

Asked if Saunders sought an extension longer than one year, Allison Sparkes, spokesperson for the Toronto police service, said all matters about the chief’s employment are “strictly between the Board and the Chief.”

“The Chief is away with his family this week, but he would decline to respond to any questions around his employment agreement,” she said in an email.

Since leaving the board, Mukherjee has been critical of Saunders and on Tuesday said he “wasn’t the right choice” and that the board “had options.”

A longtime cop with experience in major crime divisions including the homicide squad, Saunders was widely considered the choice of the rank-and-file when he was named top cop in 2015 ahead Toronto deputy police chief Peter Sloly, who was considered more progressive (Sloly was named Ottawa police chief Monday).

In Excessive Force: Toronto’s Fight to Reform City Policing, a book Mukherjee co-wrote with journalist Tim Harper, Mukherjee describes how Saunders was chosen over Sloly, concluding that a “Black chief that was seen as too invested in the Black community, too radical, too independent of the establishment — not ‘one of the boys’ — would not have been acceptable.”

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Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives, criticized Saunders’ most recent approaches to gun violence, saying that plans to deploy more officers will “only ramp up the already over-the-top surveillance of neighbourhoods in communities with large Black populations.”

In an email to the Star, Maynard pointed to the seminal 2008 Roots of Youth Violence report that, she said, called for “among many issues raised, increased funding for community spaces.”

Despite being the front-line’s choice, Saunders’ relationship with the police union has soured in recent years. Reached Tuesday, Mike McCormack, the president of the Toronto Police Association, said Saunders has “got his work cut out for him.”

McCormack pointed to the number of shootings in Toronto this year and what he claimed was the “lowest morale that we’ve seen.”

Violent crime has increased during Saunders’ tenure, including more shootings so far this year than in 2018, a year with the highest number of homicides on record, at 96.

“We’re surprised — look at his track record,” McCormack said, reached shortly after the extension was announced. “We’re looking forward to the next chief.”

Relations between the union and the chief began to intensify in early 2017 when attempts at modernizing the force translated into a planned three-year freeze on hirings and promotions. The board later backtracked on the initiative six months in, saying more officers had left the force than was planned.

Last year, the union held a no-confidence vote amid what the union called “critically low” levels of officers and morale, saying hiring was not happening fast enough. The vote — wholly symbolic, because the board employs the chief — found that 86 per cent of officers polled did not have confidence in Saunders’ leadership, though less than half of the association’s 7,300 members voted.

During his tenure, Saunders has also overseen several major investigations, including the probe into serial killer Bruce McArthur, who earlier this year pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of eight men between 2010 and 2017, most of whom had ties to Toronto’s Gay Village.

The case brought both praise to Toronto police for catching the killer and heated criticism for failing to stop him sooner. For years, members of the LGBTQ community had raised the alarm about men going missing from the community.

In the weeks after McArthur’s arrest, Saunders drew criticism for telling the Globe and Mail that civilians had failed to help with the investigation.

Wendy Gillis is a Toronto-based reporter covering crime and policing. Reach her by email at wgillis@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @wendygillis

Jim Rankin is a reporter based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @Jleerankin

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