Lying in a hospital bed recovering from serious surgery, your first item of concern should not be death threats, as in, direct threats against your life. And when that happens, the Police should take the threats seriously, even if the threat came from a muslim.
I contacted Toronto police. Within hours, two uniformed policemen from 51 Division came to interview me in hospital. However, barely one minute later, we were interrupted. Two men entered the room and told everybody else to leave. They did not identify themselves, but five minutes into what amounted to a two-hour interrogation, I realized they were police intelligence officers. One of them, I recognized by reputation – a Muslim officer who had shut down a previous investigation into a death threat against me in 2008, and another one against a partner in liberal Islam, Tahir Gora.
The money quote from moderate Muslim Tarek Fatah: “I’m hopeful that the police may yet make the right decision, now that I have gone public with this disgrace. If not, I will know the city I love is lost.”
Toronto: Not in a Death Spiral
Tarek Fatah, Toronto, Toronto Police
Just because Rob Ford is now his honour, doesn‘t mean the good ship Toronto is going to be righted. 
As Joe Warmington writes today, there’s more wrong with Toronto than Transit City and doughnuts at council meetings:
…Toronto’s first murderer of 2011 statistically has a better than a 50-50 chance of not getting caught….
Of the 60 homicides in 2010, more than half have not yet ended up in arrests which means as many as three dozen murderers may be walking free among us.
And that’s just in one year. In the first decade of the new millennium — from 2000 to 2010 — there were 220 unsolved murders in Toronto…
Toronto is not in a death spiral because of the politicians they chose, but the choices the politicians made, starting with the choice more than twenty years ago to overly-politicize their police force.
Toronto: Not in a Death Spiral
Joe Warmington, Rob Ford, Toronto, Toronto Police
Just over two weeks ago I wrote a couple of posts suggesting that the move afoot to license cyclists had more to do with restricting peoples freedom than than any benefit that may incur. Oh no, I heard, and heard… How can you give tickets to people that don’t have licenses?
How indeed?
Of that 184 tickets police issued to cyclists, 49 went to bikers whose bikes didn’t have a working bell. Forty of the tickets were issued because the cyclist didn’t have proper working lights, and 38 were issued to cyclists who were riding on the sidewalk. Other citations were given to cyclists who didn’t stop at red lights or who made improper lane changes.
Handing out tickets has never been the issue, police have been doing so to cyclists for years, just as they do to pedestrians. And therefore, it is not what the licensing issue is about.
And note to all the people who claim this is about lousy bicycle drivers being unsafe on the road, the most tickets handed out where for… not having a bell.
freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy, pimply minions of bureaucracy
bicycle license, Toronto Police
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