'CONSCIENCE IS CLEAN,' FANTINO SAYS

Julian Fantino sounded a little beaten up. "On days like this," the
Toronto police chief said yesterday, "I'd rather be in Kosovo, doing
peacekeeping."

Except for the loss of an officer in the line of duty, there probably
is nothing so difficult for a police chief to bear as a scandal such
as the one now revolving around the Toronto force.

What honourably distinguishes this one, and ought to offer comfort to
the citizens of the country's largest city, is that it was Chief
Fantino himself who drove the investigation that led to the whole
contretemps.

It was he who in the late summer of 2001, unsatisfied that an earlier
internal-affairs probe had managed to get to the bottom of things (and
this is less a reflection of the quality of that probe than a function
of its focus), invited in Chief Superintendent John Neily of the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police. Chief Fantino did this in the face of
enormous pressure from a variety of quarters, including the Toronto
Police Association, which argued that a second probe was unfair.

Chief Supt. Neily's mandate was to run a broader investigation -- and
an expensive and arduous one it turned out to be -- into allegations
of serious wrongdoing against former members of the disbanded central
command drug squad.

That culminated earlier this month in significant criminal charges
being laid against six officers and four others being named as
unindicted co-conspirators. The gory and sometimes alarming
investigative details came to light only two days ago, when the
Ontario Court of Appeal unsealed a whack of affidavits from Chief
Supt. Neily that had been used to justify keeping the whole kit and
caboodle under wraps for so long.

It was also Chief Fantino who, a few months after calling in Chief
Supt. Neily, hired retired judge George Ferguson to review some of the
larger policy and arguably systemic questions raised by the
allegations, or, as the chief put it yesterday, to find out, "Why did
this happen? What failed us? And what safeguards do we need to ensure
this never happens again?"

The judge's work -- he has reported back regularly, and Chief Fantino
says some of his recommendations have already been implemented --
continues, with a full report yet to come, and if the chief gets his
wish, made fully public.

Among the issues the judge is looking at is the question of "high-risk
jobs" such as those done by drug squad officers, and what red flags
supervisors ought to be alert to spot.

This is part of the background to the chief's remarks at a press
conference yesterday, where he defended his force against suggestions
- -- found in Chief Supt. Neily's various affidavits, filed as the
investigation progressed over more than two years -- that the
Mountie's task force encountered widespread lack of
co-operation.

The chief pointed out, and fairly so, that some of the most egregious
alleged misconduct -- the threatening of witnesses, for instance -- is
by now historic.

This is true: Chief Supt. Neily was effectively reporting back to the
appeal court at approximately six-month intervals about the progress
of the case. Thus, when his six affidavits were released this week,
what was fresh to all of us in many instances dates back to other
charges that have already been dealt with by the courts, and in some
instances even to unrelated cases.

Some allegations were duly investigated, en route, by the task force,
and found to be either unsubstantiated or not involving criminal
conduct, in which case the complaints have been referred back to
internal affairs, which still could proceed with Police Act charges.

So while the chief was pooh-poohing the notion yesterday that the
task-force investigators ran into a "blue wall" of silence -- this was
a persistent theme in Chief Supt. Neily's affidavits -- his position
is understandable. As he told me yesterday: "We persevered. We dealt
with this. There were barriers, but we broke down every barrier. These
are the results of what we initiated. No one here is championing the
view that police officers aren't to co-operate with the administration
of justice. This is not the culture of this organization."

The thoughtful new boss of the police association, Rick McIntosh, had
a nugget to add in this regard yesterday. He points out that Chief
Supt. Neily likely suffered something of a culture shock in his
dealings with the Toronto rank and file. The RCMP, Chief Supt. Neily's
home force, does not have a strong police association; only about 10
per cent of members belong, Mr. McIntosh said.

So when Chief Supt. Neily encountered witness officers in Toronto who
wanted to bring an association lawyer along to a task-force interview,
he may have found it jarring.

And, Mr. McIntosh said, he personally knows of one officer who was
told the task force wanted to talk to him as a witness, but who, when
he arrived for the interview, found he was now considered a suspect
officer, an unenviable position. Toronto officers often encountered
this same shifting suspect-witness reclassification in the earlier
days of the province's special investigations unit; they don't shrink
from exercising their right to silence.

That said, Mr. McIntosh agreed that police are "not quick to judge
each other" because they know, from experience, what can happen "when
people open their mouths without knowing the whole story, when they
see only a slice of something. It's not that they're purposefully
covering up, but sometimes what investigators think you should have
seen is not what you saw."

At bottom, the wide-ranging task-force probe (staffed largely by
Toronto police officers, it should be noted, if headed by a Mountie)
that saw all this properly come to light might well have been swept
under the carpet somewhere else. The original internal-affairs probe,
from which all this sprang, found insufficient evidence to proceed
with criminal charges. How easy it would have been to let things lie
there, to shrug and say, "Well, we tried."

Instead, Chief Fantino made two phone calls, and this week we all saw
the results.

"We didn't shirk from it," he said yesterday. "We weren't intimidated
by it, by the lawsuits [some of the now accused officers are suing the
force]. None of it has worked to deter us from doing what is in the
public interest.

"My heart is heavy," he concluded, "but my conscience is clean."