is located on
College Street in
Downtown Toronto.
Toronto Police Headquarters is located at 40
College Street, near
Bay Street in
downtown Toronto. The former headquarters at
Jarvis Street was turned into a museum (which was subsequently relocated to the current headquarters). The present site was once home to the
Toronto YMCA. The sign over the main entrance still reads "Metropolitan Toronto Police Headquarters" and displays the emblem of
Metropolitan Toronto (which was dissolved in 1998). Since 2007, the sign also displays the current emblem of the Toronto Police Service. The Toronto Police Service has approximately 5,400 uniformed officers/undercover officers and 2,500 civilian employees. Its officers are among the best paid in Canada. In October 2008, the Toronto Police Service was named one of
Greater Toronto's Top Employers by Mediacorp Canada Inc., which was announced by the
Toronto Star newspaper. The Toronto Police Service is divided into two field areas and 17 divisions (
police stations or
precincts):
Organizational structure Community Safety Command West Field Command . Encompasses the original city of Toronto, the former cities of York and East York, and some southern portions of the former City of North York. • 11 Division, 2054 Davenport Rd. • 12 Division, 200 Trethewey Dr. • 14 Division, 350 Dovercourt Rd. (14 Sub-Station is located at
Exhibition Place) • 22 Division, 3699 Bloor St. W. • 23 Division, 5230 Finch Ave. W. • 31 Division, 40 Norfinch Dr. • 51 Division, 51 Parliament St. • 52 Division, 255 Dundas St. W.
East Field Command , 41 Division is based at 2222
Eglinton Avenue East. Encompasses the former cities of North York and Scarborough. • 13 Division, 1435 Eglinton Ave. W • 32 Division, 30 Ellerslie Ave. • 33 Division, 50 Upjohn Rd. • 41 Division, 2222 Eglinton Ave. E. • 42 Division, 242 Milner Ave. E. • 43 Division, 4331 Lawrence Ave. E • 53 Division, 75 Eglinton Ave. W. • 55 Division, 101 Coxwell Ave.
Field Services • Priority Operations, 40 College St. • Toronto Police Operations Centre (TPOC), 40 College St. • Primary Report Intake, Management, and Entry Unit • Communication Services • Public Safety Response Team • Community Partnerships & Engagement Unit • Traffic Operations, 9 Hanna Ave • Parking enforcement east, 330 Progress Ave. • Parking enforcement west, 970 Lawrence Ave. West
Specialized Operations Command Detective Operations • Forensic Identification Services, 2050 Jane St. • Homicide squad, 40 College St. • Provincial Repeat Offender Parole Enforcement (PROPE) Squad. • Drug squad, 40 College St., replaced the Toronto Police Service's Central Field Command Drug Squad from the 1990s • Organized crime enforcement, 40 College St. • Financial crimes unit, 40 College St. • Hold-up squad, 40 College St. • Intelligence services, 40 College St. • Sex crimes unit, 40 College St. • Integrated gun and gang task force (Replaced by the Asian crime unit, hate crimes unit).
Public Safety Operations Operational services of the Toronto Police Service include: • Emergency Management and Public Order (Public Safety Unit, Mounted Unit) • Emergency task force, 300 Lesmill Rd. • Marine, 259 Queen's Quay W. • Mounted and police dog services, 44 Beechwood Drive • Court Services (Prisoner Transport Unit, various courthouses in the city)
Emergency task force The emergency task force is the tactical unit of the Toronto Police Service. They are mandated to deal with high-risk incidents such as gun calls, hostage situations, barricaded persons, emotionally disturbed persons, high-risk arrest warrants, and protection details. In 1961, an earlier non-SWAT riot and emergency squad was separately formed. In 1965, both of them merged into the emergency task force.
Marine unit The Toronto Police Service is one of several police forces along
Lake Ontario with a marine unit. Before the 1980s, the port area had its police force, Toronto Harbour Police/Port of Toronto Police, which merged into the
Metropolitan Police Force's marine unit. The unit's has the largest jurisdictional area of any unit in the Toronto Police Service, policing over of open water, from the
Etobicoke Creek to the
Rouge River in the west and east respectively, and south to the water boundaries of
Niagara Region and the
United States. The Toronto Police Service has a fleet of 24 boats based either at the main station of the unit, at 259 Queens Quay West in
Harbourfront; or at one of its three substations, at
Humber Bay, the
Scarborough Bluffs, and the
Toronto Islands. The Toronto Police Service Marine Unit works in conjunction with other municipal and regional police units that operate marine units in Lake Ontario, including the Durham Regional Police, Halton Regional Police,
Hamilton Police Service,
Niagara Regional Police Service, and the Peel Regional Police. The Marine Unit also works in partnership with the neighboring York Regional Police, although their marine unit is based in
Lake Simcoe. The unit's is based at
Horse Palace at
Exhibition Place. A full-time was formed by police service was formed in 1886 to provide a presence in outlying areas of the city where police were seldom seen prior. Initially, the mounted unit's duties included rounding up stray cattle and horses, providing crowd control, providing a mounted escort for parades, and regulating street traffic. During the
First World War, the mounted unit provided 18 horses to the
Canadian Field Artillery. Only one horse from the Toronto Police Service survived the four-year conflict. Other horses include:
Parking enforcement Parking enforcement on all roads and public property is the responsibility of the Toronto Police and works with
Toronto Parking Authority. Parking enforcement officers are provincial offense officers able to issue parking tickets under Part II of the
Provincial Offences Act. They do not carry any use-of-force items and are unarmed, but are issued Kevlar vests for safety. They are peace officers under section 15 of the
Police Services Act to enforce municipal by-laws. Their uniform consists of a blue shirt, black cargo pants with blue stripes, a black vest, and a cap with blue stripes. Boots are similar to front-line police officers. In the winter months, parking enforcement officers have a blue jacket with reflective trim. Patches on the jackets and shirts are similar to those of the Toronto Police Service, but with a white background and the blue wording "parking enforcement". Their vehicles have the same paint scheme as the older Toronto Police Service squad cars, but they are labeled with "parking enforcement" and fleet numbers "PKE" (east) or "PKW" (west).
Police dog services The Toronto Police Service
police dog unit was created in 1989 and is deployed to search for suspects, missing persons, and perform other duties. The service has 17 general-purpose dogs. There are four drug enforcement dogs and one explosives detector dog. The 21 officers and dogs are assigned to this unit and are based at 44 Beechwood Drive in Toronto, East York. Toronto Police dogs that have died during their service, including Keno, a firearms detector, and Luke, a general service dog, both in 2011.
Community Mobilization Unit s of the Toronto Police Service • Auxiliary (
auxiliary constable), volunteer and rover program • Youth programs • Empowered student partnership • Toronto Recreational Outreach Program (TROOP) • Public Education and Crime Eradication (PEACE) Project
Traffic services As
400-series highways are owned by the province of Ontario, policing on 400-series highways within the city of Toronto (highways 401, 400, 427, 404) is the responsibility of the
Ontario Provincial Police (though all Ontario police officers have province-wide jurisdiction). Toronto Police Traffic Services is responsible for patrolling local roads and municipal expressways (
W.R. Allen Road,
Don Valley Parkway,
F.G. Gardiner Expressway); traffic services have a "60" or "66 Division" (60xx or 66xx) designation on their cars.
Transit Bureau The transit bureau commands 12 transit districts where TPS officers patrol the
Toronto Transit Commission vehicles and property. The bureau replaced the earlier Special Constable Services (c. 1997), Transit Patrol Unit (2009–2013), and the non-fare enforcement role of the
TTC Special Constables. From 1987 to 1997, TTC staff enforced TTC bylaws and fare issues without a formal unit.
Toronto Police Pipe Band The Toronto Police Pipe Band was formed in 1912. The band was originally composed of serving police officers; however, membership is open to any person. Today, the Toronto Police Pipe Band organization comprises two professional bands in grades 1 and 2, and 3 juvenile bands in grades 3, 4, and 5 through its affiliate Ryan Russell Memorial Pipe Band. The bands compete in local and international pipe band competitions, and also play as representatives of the police force in community parades, and police ceremonies.
Former departments Toronto Police Lifeguard Service Toronto Police previously employed
lifeguards, responsible for patrolling 11 beaches and 44 kilometers of shoreline during the summer months, who were assisted by the Toronto Police Service (including the marine unit),
Toronto Paramedic Services, and
Toronto Fire Services. In 2017, as part of a modernization initiative, the Toronto Police Lifeguard Service was transferred to the
Toronto Parks, Forestry & Recreation Division.
Morality department The morality department was formed in 1886, when then Mayor
William Holmes Howland appointed ex-
Royal Irish Constabulary officer David Archibald to head this special unit of the Toronto Police Service to deal specifically with "vice, sin, and crimes which heavily impacted women and children". Howland had just won Toronto's mayoral race that year by promising to make Toronto a beacon of morality for the world, even going so far as to give Toronto the moniker, "Toronto the Good". The department ran through the 1930s, and was seen as a forerunner to many social assistance programs, such as the Children's Aid Society. It was set up under a social purist pretext of policing people's everyday behaviors so that Toronto might live up to Howland's moniker. Among the offenses, though not necessarily crimes, that morality officers policed were gambling, "
blue laws" or "Sabbath laws", being an absentee father, drug dealing, interracial relationships, homosexuality, bootlegging and alcoholism,
vagrancy, family abuse and prostitution. The people in power who wrote these laws, such as Howland, and created the morality department said that they were there to protect moral and good people from the evils of the city. However, when examining the direct implementation/enforcement of these laws, and the effects they had on civilian life, the larger purpose of the morality department was to prevent working-class people from socializing or coming together, and thereby to keep them in a generally less powerful position.
Context The roots of this social purity doctrine can be traced back to the belief in the good of British colonialism, ideas still holding strong in the late 19th century in Canada, as Canada's national identity was still strongly linked to British ideals. The assumption is that bad people behave objectively badly and that these people need to be made good by a sovereign government. This government does so by limiting the civilian population's freedoms and regulating their social interactions to ensure that people remain "moral and good", and thereby can make a new generation of "moral and good" people. Of course, everyone would fall under these practices who was not seen to be morally or socially good, but women and people of color were seen by the government as inherently lesser or more susceptible to temptation or sin, and so they were policed far more heavily than their white or male counterparts. The resulting system of social governing was easily abused to keep a divide between classes wide, through methods like disproportionately enforcing the laws when the accused were of lower classes, and making special exemptions for people who lived or served those who lived in the higher classes. And, once again, since women and people of color were seen as inherently more susceptible to temptation, they were automatically made targets of the system's efforts to socially reform people.
Methods and effectiveness The officers' methods often called for them to threaten fines or jail time rather than arrest all offenders, which made them popular among people as a social service. People knew that they probably would not be arrested or get the unwanted publicity that goes along with being arrested and going through the public courts. In this way, these officers became regulators of the community. Ordinary people interacted with them and thereby came to trust them. As a result, these officers had many people willing to give them information on who might be a suspected drug dealer, prostitute, gambler, or absentee father.
Prostitution The primary focus of the anti-prostitution laws was to make prostitution unprofitable so that women would instead pursue legitimate ways to make money. In essence, the people who put these laws in place were attempting to save women from a life of prostitution. The legitimate forms of employment were few and far between; maid, secretary, and factory worker were the only plentiful options, and each of those put women in a position where they were constantly subordinate to another. Prostitution had a much wider definition to the social purists of the time than it does now. For example, if a man bought a woman dinner and the woman then went home with him, that was considered prostitution. Thus, any woman, and especially working-class women without social standing, who sought out men were persecuted, though not prosecuted. Seemingly innocuous behaviors, such as walking alone at night, might also get a woman arrested for prostitution.
Sabbath laws The Sabbath laws (alternatively known as "blue laws") were a series of laws designed to prevent people from working on the
Sabbath, commonly known as Sunday, to respect the
Abrahamic God's day of rest. They, like most laws enforced by the morality department, disproportionately affected working-class people and favored the upper class. One of the best examples of this was the fact that taxis used by the public to get around were not allowed to work on Sundays, but private chauffeurs of the wealthy were. Beyond preventing many forms of work, they also prevented people from doing certain leisure activities that could be interpreted as work. Similar to the taxi driver–chauffeur contradiction, ball games for children in public on Sundays still allow for games of golf at private clubs. Such contradictions led people to believe that these laws were put in place to prevent working-class people from consorting with each other, to keep them separate and easy to manage.
Absentee fathers For most of their operating time, the majority of their work was finding absentee fathers from Canada, the U.S., and Great Britain, and then coercing them into paying maintenance payments. These maintenance payments would go towards supporting their wives and children. This reinforced a family structure where the father was a provider, and the mother was unable to support herself or her family. As attitudes towards policing among the upper ranks moved away from social management and into crime and punishment in the 1920s, it came to be that the police and social activist groups alike agreed that this work was no longer a job for the police. In 1929, the newly established family court system took over the management of these payments.
First women on the force Morality officer was one of the first roles within the police force, not including secretary, that women were allowed to fulfill. In the early 1910s, they were brought in under the idea that they would be better suited to deal with young women who had been acting immorally and that they would themselves be a moralizing influence in the police service. Also, the existence of policewomen was an encouragement for women to come forward with assault charges against their abusive husbands. Women would trust that if they went to a police officer who was also female, then something would be more likely to get done. Yet, the majority of their duties included arresting and searching female suspects, and interviewing female suspects and victims. As well, rather than being on the beat in dangerous parts of town, they would be searching for people, though mostly women, acting immorally, particularly in places where men and women came together. They were never tasked with the same duties as their male counterparts, and so were seen more as social workers within the police force than actual members of the force. Through the 1920s, feminists argued that these policewomen were taken on by police for show more than to be actual policewomen, and interest from the upper ranks in policewomen faded along with their interest in social management since the upper ranks saw the two as being deeply connected. A few more women were taken on until after
World War II, and those who were there gained little ground for women in the police force.
School crossing guards Adult crossing guards at various intersections and crosswalks were employed and paid by the Toronto Police Service; however, as part of a modernization initiative, the crossing guard program was transferred to the City of Toronto in 2017. ==Ranks==