A 39-year-old man is recovering in hospital after he was shot by Toronto police during a stabbing investigation in the city’s downtown core Monday, the 21st incident involving the service in 2016 that has triggered an investigation by the Special Investigations Unit.
The SIU is an independent agency responsible for investigating incidents where death, serious injury or allegations of sexual assault arise from interactions involving police.
A team of 10 investigators from the SIU has taken over the case. The SIU says the stabbing and shooting incidents are “part of one larger incident.”
SIU spokesperson Jason Gennaro said police were called to the area of Yonge St., just north of Dundas St. some time after 5:30 a.m. following reports of a man attacking another man with a knife.
Police arrived at around 6 a.m., and confronted the 39-year-old man on Dundas St. between Bay and Yonge Sts., a short distance away from the stabbing call.
North of the Eaton Centre on Dundas St., bloody clothing and at least four red cups were among the evidence strewn along the road and sidewalk.
A 66-year-old man was treated in hospital for a knife wound and later released.
The man shot by police “was struck a number of times,” Gennaro said. He was taken to St. Michael’s Hospital for surgery and is now in stable condition.
So far, there have been 21 SIU investigations involving Toronto police in 2016, the highest number of investigations involving the service in the past five years based on new releases published on the SIU’s website.
This time last year, there had been 12 investigations. There were a total of 20 in 2015; the SIU cleared Toronto police of wrongdoing in six of those cases and the rest are still active.
An SIU investigation doesn’t mean someone was killed or assaulted by police; the agency also investigates if, for example, a person takes their own life or otherwise dies in the presence of police, or if a suspect is injured but the use of force is justified.
Toronto police spokesperson Mark Pugash said it’s the outcomes of the investigations that matter.
“The issue, I think, for the service, is not the numbers, the issue is if they highlight areas we need to look at . . . And you’d also need to go back and see in how many of those cases they found nothing wrong with what the officers did,” Pugash said. “I don’t think the global numbers in and of themselves tell you very much without speaking to the SIU, without looking at, of those cases, how many of them they investigated and they found that they had no concerns about what the officers did.”
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