The Toronto Police Service headquarters stands on College Street on Aug. 9, 2019.The Canadian Press
In the weeks after the April mass shooting in Nova Scotia – in which a gunman had disguised himself as a police officer by using both lookalike and official equipment – Toronto Police initiated a service-wide audit of the force’s gear in hopes of preventing a similar tragedy.
As unit commanders across the city began their inventory checks, TPS’s Professional Standards Unit took special interest in one particular piece of equipment: service radios.
“We had an interest in the results of the radio audit to determine which radios were unaccounted for,” Inspector Brett Nicol said.
Last month, a corruption probe by Insp. Nicol’s unit revealed that police radios were being stolen – in at least one case, as part of an alleged inside job – and then cloned by tow-truck drivers.
So far, three TPS radios have been recovered as part of that probe, along with additional radios and parts that are believed to have been stolen from other police services. But it’s unclear whether there could be more radios out there.
Because Toronto Police uses a rotation system for their radios – in which officers check them in and out at each shift change – Insp. Nicol acknowledged that there is always a chance that a radio could be left in a desk drawer or a locker.
“Those radios that aren’t reported [as stolen or lost] and are unaccounted for, that’s where we should be taking an interest right now,” he said.
Insp. Nicol said he is not aware of the final results of the equipment audits (and the service told The Globe and Mail Wednesday that they would not be releasing the findings publicly).
“At this point, it hasn’t been declared an issue that needs to be further investigated,” he said.
But in the meantime, other services across the Greater Toronto Area have quietly undertaken their own radio-inventory checks as parallel investigations into violence and corruption within the towing industry continue.
Tow-truck drivers across the GTA have been engaged in a deadly turf war for close to two years, fighting for slices of the collision-towing – or “accident-chasing” – business. Since 2018, a Globe investigation in February first revealed, more than 50 tow trucks have been set on fire, multiple people have been shot, and at least four men with ties to the industry have been killed.
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The “chasing” business is rife with fraud, and it is an open secret that peripheral businesses such as body shops, rental-car agencies and physiotherapy clinics are willing to pay tow-truck drivers kickbacks to bring them business. In some cases, entire crashes are being staged.
In Toronto, where police transmissions are encrypted, police radios give chasers a lucrative advantage by allowing them to get a heads-up on car-crash locations.
Investigators in Toronto first heard rumours last August about stolen police radios and towing-related police corruption.
In early May, when police pulled over a tow-truck driver for dangerous driving on Highway 400, they discovered that he had an official TPS radio – one with the same identification number as another radio in use by police. The radio had been stolen and cloned, with the cloned radio then returned to the police station in the original’s place – a swap that police allege was done by Constable Ronald Joseph.
The 47-year-old police officer was arrested last month and is facing numerous charges including breach of trust, secret commissions, commission of an offence for a criminal organization, possession of a device to intercept private communications and trafficking in property obtained by crime.
At the same time that he was working as a police officer, police say Constable Joseph also owned a rental-car agency and two tow trucks – and was allegedly receiving kickbacks and referrals for those side businesses.
He is scheduled to appear in court in September. In the meantime, he is suspended with pay.
Another five officers have been suspended with pay as a result of the investigation. Insp. Nicol said that while the allegations against them (which have not led to criminal charges) stem from the same probe, they are not directly tied to the towing industry.
After York Regional Police were made aware about what had happened in Toronto, Superintendent Michael Slack says the service conducted a similar internal audit and technical survey. They concluded that their radio system had not been compromised. Supt. Slack led a recent investigation into violence and corruption within the GTA towing industry that has resulted in more than 30 arrests to date.
Halton Regional Police, too, said that they are “fully aware of what occurred with TPS and the ongoing investigation, and after hearing the news began moving forward with an immediate audit.”
Halton Police are among a number of services who assign their officers a designated radio.
Durham Regional Police do the same. While no specific audit was conducted in relation to the Toronto probe, a DRPS spokesperson said they do regular inventory audits, and one is scheduled for later this summer.
Hamilton Police, who also assign their radios, said they also conduct audits periodically. Spokesperson Jerome Stewart said they are “not aware of any technology that has the ability to clone our radios.”
The Ontario Provincial Police service’s radios are not encrypted, so tow-truck drivers are already able to (and do) listen to their broadcasts, spokesperson Sergeant Kerry Schmidt said.
In addition to potential corruption, the cloned-radio case also raises concerns about the security of Toronto’s police radios – which the service spent $35.5-million in 2015 to encrypt.
“It’s certainly something that when you spend that money, you anticipate you won’t have to face,” Insp. Nicol said. “When you pay for that level of encryption, you would expect that it couldn’t be easily compromised.”
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