There are 18 faces smiling at the camera.
They are the class of 2020, murdered without resolution, unsolved, cold.
On Thursday at around 9 a.m., another once-alive smiling face was added to the board when a 27-year-old North York father was shot to death in a shocking drive-by shooting.
His newborn baby and a female companion saw it unfold. The couple were taking the baby to the hospital.
Right now, the specifics of homicide No. 0562020 are vague.
With an endless stream of murders and shooting incidents that are vaporizing boundaries of geography and morality, it would be easy to despair.
As of Thursday morning, there have been 56 homicides in the city and an infinite amount of gunplay.
It doesn’t look like it, but the bad guys are getting caged.
Police services around North America have despaired for at least a decade on the dropping clearance rate for homicides. Chicago’s unit, once one of the best in the world, struggles to hit 50%.
Toronto has also struggled in recent years with closing cases. Despite the gunplay, TPS is achieving a better than 70% clearance for murders in 2020.
Homicide chieftain Insp. Hank Idsinga told the Toronto Sun people are “tired” of the endless gunplay and more are co-operating with police.
“The reason? The best investigators that the Toronto Police Service has developed, coupled with a community which is tired of the shootings and are standing up with tips and evidence for us,” Idsinga said.
“We’re at 55 murders so far this year, with 39 of them solved.”
Idsinga said that makes for a 70.9% clearance rate.
But the veteran detective, who has investigated some of the city’s most explosive murders, said he expects more arrests for the roster of 2020 slayings.
In the homicide business, things can change quickly. There could be another spike that stretches investigative resources to the breaking point.
“It’s hard to comment on it at a specific time, because of course it always goes up,” Idsinga said.
“I won’t put the cart before the horse on the 70.9%, though. As I recall, at this time last year, we were essentially in the same situation, and then had a run of cases which pulled the solve rate down through the last quarter of the year.”
For 2019, the clearance rate stands at 63.29% and Idsinga said that too will increase.
Another marker is increased success in solving gun-related murders, which sits at around 55%.
“The homicide investigators are doing a phenomenal job. These are all very tough to solve,” he said.
But apparently not impossible. Toronto may be alone among big North American cities where stats are trending in the right direction.
There will be many more tears and heartbroken families. Cries of outrage and disgust will ring out from Scarborough to Etobicoke.
Yet quietly, without fanfare, this city’s homicide detectives are getting the job done.
On a warm March day in New York City in the late 1990s, I attended the Big Apple’s famed St. Patrick’s Day parade with about a million other people.
The city had reached its homicide zenith in 1992 with around 2,300 murders. Then the cops started turning things around.
When your streets are safe, more people come out, spend money, have fun. In New York at that time, the city felt alive again.
And on that St. Paddy’s Day in the Big Apple, thousands of NYPD officers marched, many of them Irish.
Dozens of women went over the barricades — not to protest, and not to scream in the cops’ faces.
No, they were giving them kisses in gratitude for giving them their city back.
It would be nice to see that here.
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