Det.-Sgt. Hank Idsinga is seen after briefing the media at a Toronto property where alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur worked, on Feb. 8, 2018.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Nearly 20 years ago, Hank Idsinga was part of a downtown detective division. The Toronto police officer had considered himself a hotshot investigator – but then he was promoted into the homicide squad.
He soon found that, compared with his previous work probing crimes, proving suspects culpable in court for fatal shootings and stabbings to the satisfaction of senior detectives, and then lawyers, and then judges and juries, was like a different world.
“I very quickly realized – I don’t know anything,” Inspector Idsinga said in a recent interview, reflecting on his start in 2005. But he stayed in the squad for nearly two decades, and headed it for the past five years.
Toronto Police Inspector Hank Idsinga addresses the media at a news conference at police headquarters in February 2019, after the sentencing of Toronto serial killer Bruce McArthur.COLE BURSTON/AFP/Getty Images
With 2023 drawing to a close, Insp. Idsinga was retiring and said he was proudest of how the Toronto Police Service is now quickly solving – or clearing, as it’s called – about four out of every five homicide cases in the city.
“No large metropolitan jurisdiction in North America gets that,” Insp. Idsinga said, adding that prior to 2022 “we hadn’t gotten over 80 per cent for 26 years – 1998 I believe was the last time.”
National data shows Toronto is bucking some trends. According to Statistics Canada data provided to The Globe and Mail, urban homicides across the country rose to 874 in 2022 from a low of 512 in 2013. The national solve rate for these crimes stands at around 70 per cent, down from about 80 per cent a decade ago.
Toronto’s status as Canada’s largest municipality means that the city often sees the most killings in the country – typically about 70 homicides a year, according to police data – despite being a relatively low violence city on a per capita basis.
This average is staying flat despite brisk population growth. And as of Dec. 21, the city’s police service had recorded 69 homicides in 2023 and considered 56 of them solved – a rate of 81 per cent.
That success rate is better than that of Toronto’s immediate neighbours, which are seeing more homicides than they used to. Statscan data shows that in 2022, the collective clearance rates for Peel, York, Halton, Durham and Toronto – the census metropolitan area – was a little more than 70 per cent.
Five years ago, however, the City of Toronto’s solve rates were lower as the homicide rates were higher. In 2018 Toronto had an outlier year of 98 homicides, with a van attack killing 11 people. A 25-year-old man was immediately arrested for that crime, but police statistics indicate that relatively few of those cases from that year have been cleared – only about two-thirds.
Insp. Idsinga took over the homicide unit that summer, when the squad’s work was under criticism on several fronts. The Toronto Police Service had arrested Bruce McArthur in early 2018, but by that point the serial killer had been operating for many years, murdering gay men while escaping police suspicion. Police were also under pressure to make an arrest in the December, 2017, slayings of billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman, a case that remains unsolved.
What has changed in recent years?
The Toronto Police homicide unit has been bolstering its ranks to better ensure police can flood the field in the crucial first 48 hours of an investigation. “We gradually started absorbing constables from across the city and growing the size of the homicide squad,” Insp. Idsinga said. “So you wouldn’t have to beg and borrow from the divisions for assets to help you with murder investigations.”
Most key, he said, is a team rotation structure that retains talent, so commanders can draw in and bring back promising investigators who may otherwise be pulled off in other career directions.
“I really think it’s the staffing. Not necessarily the numbers of people in the office, but the types of people that we brought into the office.”
Bystanders watch as Toronto police investigate a fatal shooting in a parking lot in the city's downtown east end on July 25.Colin N. Perkel/The Canadian Press
Technology has become crucial too. Security cameras, dash cameras and doorbell cameras are now ubiquitous eyewitnesses to urban crime. Police in Toronto are getting better at gathering footage from several devices, splicing together a suspect’s movements to and from a crime scene and putting it all onto highlight reels that could be played for jurors.
“We created a forensic video analysis unit in 2018, so surveillance video obviously plays a huge, huge role nowadays,” Insp. Idsinga said.
New DNA techniques are also a boon to investigators. This fall, a man from Moosonee, Ont., pleaded guilty to murdering two Toronto women back in 1983.
Police caught that killer through investigative genetic genealogy. In this process, biological evidence captured long ago from crime scenes is compared against DNA profiles in private-sector databases, where such data has been volunteered for police searches by some consumers who had submitted their own DNA for analysis by genealogy services. During such searches, police aren’t necessarily hoping to find an exact DNA match, but rather look at thousands of family trees for telltale traits that can potentially help zero in on a particular suspect.
These kinds of DNA deductions can still take years of painstaking police work. But Insp. Idsinga imagines these processes will become quicker and more accessible, and may eventually be done through artificial intelligence before long.
“You’re going to use that technology for active, fresh cases. The implications are huge,” he said. “There’s no reason any murder, where you have a offender DNA profile, shouldn’t be solved, right?”