Daily BrewMissing guns, weapons from Toronto’s Peel Region police highlights national trend
Officers in Toronto's Peel Region have reportedly lost a healthy arsenal of weapons in recent years including police batons, sniper rifles and loaded clips of ammunition.
The news broke on the heels of a Toronto Star study that analyzed more than 40 police occurrence reports with mention of lost or stolen weapons from 2005 to 2010.
Officers have reported losing weapons in places such as parks, parking lots and even Tim Hortons. Perhaps more alarming than the misplaced weapons themselves are the eight cases written off as "solved" or "complete" even though the officers had not recovered the missing weapons.
The Star's findings estimate that nearly 75 per cent of Peel Region's misplaced weapons from the past 17 years were never recovered, with mention of at least five cases where weapons had disappeared from inside the police facility.
"Losing that much equipment shows negligence and just a lack of caring," said John Sewell, former Toronto mayor and head of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, in the Star report. "That seems to me to be the big problem."
But the problem appears to go well beyond the exposure of the Peel Region police - Canada's National Firearms Association revealed a disturbing national trend of lost or stolen police weapons after requesting documents via access-to-information legislation.
"The NFA says its access request resulted in the RCMP revealing that 32 guns have been lost or stolen from its members, 316 guns were lost or stolen from other police forces and another 80 from other public agencies, not including the military," reports the Vancouver Sun.
A time frame was not provided in response to the access request but NFA president Sheldon Clare believes the documents appear to date back to October 2008.
Clare and his organization have long been opposed to Canada's national gun registry, and the NFA's findings suggest police could be contributing to the problem of guns and firearms falling into the hands or criminals.
"It seems to me there is a little bit of a double standard here," said Clare in the story.
It's time for the authorities to understand the use of deadly firearms in our nation goes well beyond law-abiding gun owners, he said.
(CP Photo)
