Mounting pushback from some factions of front-line Toronto police officers has put a target on plans to modernize and cut costs within Canada’s largest municipal police service.

In a week that saw Mayor John Tory and Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack trading barbs over how to handle violent crime, a fake advertisement began circulating within police social media circles throughout the week, a fictitious boxing match pitting Tory against Toronto police Sgt. Mark Hayward.

Calling the faux fight the “main event” of a real upcoming fundraiser called Gloves Up Toronto, a night of boxing matches for first responders, the ad said “Turncoat Tory” would be up against “legendary hero” Hayward.

Since Hayward drew citywide attention last week for his scathing letter to Tory — alleging he was a “direct contributor” to recent gun violence — the veteran officer has become both the subject of an internal police investigation and a champion to a subset of frustrated front-line officers.

“He said what everyone is feeling so we all need to stand up and support him,” wrote one officer in a private police Facebook group, alive this week with scorn for both Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders and Tory, who also sits on the Toronto police board.

The criticism highlights dissent among some officers over the modernization plan launched in early 2017, which is aimed at building public trust and cutting the police budget — the single biggest line item in the city’s $11-billion, taxpayer-funded operating budget.

Decreasing the number of police officers — and deploying them in a more strategic way through partnerships with the city — is one aspect of the larger plan, but it has led to claims by the police union and some officers that reduced staffing has translated into increased crime, burnout and disillusionment within the ranks.

As Tory and Saunders together unveiled a plan this week to combat gun violence, in part through increased police staffing overnight during the summer, McCormack expressed concern about how the extra shifts would be filled, given that officers are already worn out by running from “call to call to call.”

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But police leadership and members of the transformational task force, which was struck to help develop the modernization plan, say it’s inaccurate and unfair to connect the recent spate of shootings with ongoing changes, especially in the midst of implementation.

“I think the best recommendation right now for everybody is to take a deep breath,” said David Soknacki, who was a member of the transformational task force and served as an adviser to Tory after running against him in the mayor’s race in 2014.

That task force — which included civilians and high-ranking officers, two of whom are now deputy chiefs — expected pushback, Soknacki said.

But he said everyone involved should “recognize that changes are expected by the residents, necessary for the health of policing and our great city and, at the same time, recognize that it’s challenging for both the police service as an organization and its members.”

The modernization of the service was billed as the top priority when Saunders took the helm in 2015. The next year, the task force began its work to find efficiencies and build waning public trust, their final set of recommendations later unanimously passed by the police board. McCormack has been critical of the report from the outset, calling it a “city hall cost-cutting exercise.”

The report makes 32 wide-ranging recommendations, a fact Saunders has been reiterating this past week amid the laserlike focus on the number of officers.

Those changes range from greater investments in technology, to rearranging the divisional map across the city to reduce the number of police stations, to disbanding the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) — the latter move criticized by Hayward in his letter to Tory.

In a statement last week announcing a professional standards investigation into Hayward’s letter, Saunders emphasized the importance of implementing the modernization plan as a whole.

“Its success is dependent on the entire strategy, not any one factor,” Saunders said.

The number of officers on the streets is of course important, a fact Saunders, Tory and the police board have acknowledged. As of this week, there are 4,934 uniformed police officers, down from about 5,100 this time last year.

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The modernization plan established a goal of reducing the number of officers to 4,750 by 2019 and implemented a three-year hiring freeze to get there. But six months in it was lifted as the service saw a greater than expected number of staff departures and has since signed on to hire 200 officers this year.

But numbers don’t always tell the whole story. With a spike in shootings this year over last have come comparisons to 2005’s Summer of the Gun, which saw a record high of 52 fatal shootings that year. Staffing in 2005, meanwhile, looked substantially different, with 5,504 officers walking the streets — nearly 600 more officers than today.

The more nuanced message that Tory and Saunders have been attempting to communicate has to do less with the number of officers and more with how they’re deployed.

A central tenet of the modernization plan, they say, is about taking non-emergency calls off the plates of highly trained and paid officers, civilianizing certain non-specialized tasks.

Toronto police currently take the “lion’s share” of non-emergency calls, Saunders said, including answering tens of thousands of noise calls a year. Time devoted to non-emergency calls means officers cannot be doing real police work, anything from investigations to community policing.

Speaking to reporters this week, Tory stressed that the city is stepping in to see non-emergency calls redirected to the city-run 311 system and answered by bylaw enforcement officers. In a recent visit to a downtown police station, Tory said he observed that four police officers from the division had to fill in for crossing guards; officers who otherwise would have been available for police work.

Next week, the executive committee will continue the process of overtaking non-emergency responsibilities currently falling to police; council already approved the transfer of the school crossing guard and beach lifeguard programs from Toronto police to the city.

“This is stuff that is very actively underway, being very aggressively pursued, all in the cause of saying we can make more police resources available in the community, on the streets, without getting into this discussion entirely about how many people we hire,” Tory said.

Hiring, he continued, is important and is happening, “but that isn’t the only answer, as some people would have the public believe.”

Still, McCormack maintains that as this shift is happening, it’s clear there haven’t been sufficient numbers of officers on the streets fighting crime. The plan announced by Saunders and Tory Thursday to deploy 200 more officers overnight for the next two months was an obvious acknowledgment of this, McCormack said in an interview this week.

But he sees it as a “temporary solution” and says it’s not clear what the plan will be after the summer.

Councillor Jim Hart, a former general manager at the city who became a police board member recently, said much more time and communication will be required to allow the transformation plan to work. In the meantime, it’s not fair to blame modernization for the city’s current woes.

“Anytime you go through a reorganization of any business … the first thing you look at is not so much how many resources you have, you look at do you have the right people, are they in the right places, are they there at the right time, are they doing the right things?” he said.

“It’s really about strategic deployment of resources no matter what business you’re in.”

He adds that better connecting officers in the field with new technology will help by allowing them to access real-time information and reduce the amount of paperwork they have to do.

“You have to expect there will be a few bumps along the road to implementation. But, at the end of the day, when they’re implemented and the officers can see how the community benefits and how their work benefits, then I think they’ll be very accepting of it.”

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