Stefan Prentice, the head of the Toronto Police Service’s new counterterrorism squad, says his unit is meant to have close connections to the RCMP to ensure that municipal investigations can meet national security standards from early in the warrant writing stages to the finishing touches.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
The head of the Toronto Police Service’s new counterterrorism squad says that local police forces have a crucial role to play in pre-empting, investigating and enhancing prosecutions around crimes hatched by extremists.
While terrorism investigations typically fall under the RCMP’s federal policing mandate, Toronto Police last month announced the new unit as part of its response to violence linked to the Middle East conflict. Canada’s largest city is grappling with an increase in alleged hate crimes and extremist violence, which include shootings targeting Jewish schools, synagogues sites and businesses, as well as bullets fired last month at the U.S. consulate.
Superintendent Stefan Prentice who was assigned this week to lead the new Toronto Police counterterrorism security unit told The Globe and Mail in an interview that the new squad is unique among municipal police departments in Canada. The unit is “not an insignificant investment,” he said, while declining to say how many people he’s overseeing.
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The Toronto Police Service is not attempting to change the current structure where terrorism prosecutions are led by federal police and prosecutors, he said. Rather, his unit is meant to have close connections to the RCMP, to ensure that municipal investigations can meet national security standards from early in the warrant writing stages, to the finishing touches that put evidence forward at trial.
In that way, more local investigations might eventually support more federal terrorism charges. The new counterterrorism unit is being broken out of the Toronto Police Intelligence Services branch, which Supt. Prentice had headed prior to April 8, when his appointment was announced.
Toronto’s police chief Myron Demkiw credited the unit and other recent initiatives as being part of a strategic pivot that this week helped the force lay firearms charges against a 35-year-old man in connection with a shooting at a Jewish-owned restaurant.
Initially, the Anti-Terrorism Act, passed into law in 2001, put terrorism charges in the hands of the RCMP, which leads about five Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams (INSET) across the country. These teams incorporate police officers from municipal forces, as well as representatives from other federal agencies such as the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
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Usually, local police have little independent leeway to determine whether the crimes they deal with constitute terrorism and may not always know to refer cases to the RCMP.
The Mounties say they are encouraged by Toronto’s new approach to combatting extremism. “The RCMP welcomes the Toronto Police Service’s commitment to community safety with their new Counter-Terrorism Security Unit,” Mountie Assistant Commissioner Matt Pegg said in a statement last month. “We look forward to the ongoing collaboration with INSET.”
Supt. Prentice said city police can play a crucial role in advancing terrorism investigations, because it’s not always clear at the outset of a crime investigation whether an incident may involve terrorism or extremist ideologies.
“You don’t always know exactly why it’s happening, or if there’s ideology,” he said. “We really need to make sure that we’re right at the table with the investigators, bringing that perspective, and so that we will ask the questions – Is it a criminal offence only? Or is it criminal with some terrorism components to it? Or is it criminal extremism?”
In the case of the recent restaurant shooting last week, police said someone fired at a Jewish-owned business in the North York area and then drove away. Uniformed and plainclothes officers from multiple squads had already been deployed to the city’s Jewish neighbourhoods for Passover as part of a larger security plan.
Due to that deployment, police were already in the area when the gunshots were reported, which allowed them to see the suspect flee in a vehicle with an observed licence plate.
Supt. Prentice declined to comment about the case, but he said his team exists to share intelligence and help create the conditions for such arrests. “The counterterrorism security unit is the one that’s responsible for building the deployments and telling people where to go, what’s important, when to be there,” he said.
Last year, Supt. Prentice was recognized as part of a Canadian Chiefs of Police Association award for helping Toronto Police plan for six Taylor Swift concerts. Such events are seen as potential targets for violence following a 2016 mass shooting, which killed 60, in Las Vegas at a country music festival and a 2017 bombing, during an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, which led to 22 deaths.
More recently, Supt. Prentice helped oversee the Toronto Police contribution to Project Neapolitan – a police probe that started in Peel Region, but which evolved into a RCMP-led INSET terrorism case.
In July, three men in the Greater Toronto Area were charged with alleged sexual assaults and attempted abductions. In December, additional terrorism charges were laid as authorities alleged they discovered ties to an overseas group, the Islamic State. Police issued a statement saying the crimes were “motivated by hate – particularly targeting women and members of the Jewish community.”
Supt. Prentice said the Project Neapolitan case showcases a sensibility for the newly struck counterterrorism unit. “We might become aware of the criminal behaviour, and then as we investigate the criminal behaviour, the other stuff starts to become clearer.”