In a tweet posted by Constable Mehrdad Sayedzadeh, the Community Response Officer at 54 Division, a pile of guns was profiled in a photo, complete with identifying information on who turned them in.
“This thing stinks,” said one of the people whose name and contact information was visible.
“It’s f^&*ing unbelievable,” he said when reached by phone.
The gun buyback program was announced on April 26 by Mayor John Tory and Police Chief Mark Saunders.
A now-deleted Tweet posted by a Toronto Police officer on Tuesday clearly showed personal information of participants in the city’s gun buy-back program. The Toronto Sun has obscured the personal information revealed in the photo.I said at the time that the program was unlikely to get guns out of the hands of gangsters and so far, that appears to be the case.
In the photos tweeted out by Const. Sayedzadeh, a series or hunting rifles and shotguns are seen laid out on the floor along with a group of pistols on a table.
Foolishly, the property tags containing key personal information were not removed, blocked out or otherwise made unreadable.
“That is putting it mildly,” said the man at the end of the phone when asked if he is pissed off at the cops for putting out his personal information.
Once made aware of the tweet, TPS deleted it and apologized.
“We regret the error and the concern it has caused for the individual. The tweet was removed immediately upon notice. We will review this occurrence and take steps to avoid similar issues in the future,” said spokesperson Allison MacNeil Sparkes.
Is that enough for exposing the personal info of someone that turned in guns?
They could now be the target of thieves looking for more guns.
This is inexcusable.
Beyond putting out personal data that the police should be charged with protecting, it appears that the Toronto Police Service is also overpaying in its gun buyback program.
“What I see from that picture is someone that figured they could get $350 instead of $50-$150,” said Mark Morelli.
Morelli is a retired Hamilton police officer and an avid gun collector.
As the man behind The Canadian Gun Vault, Morelli is familiar with the prices that the guns in the photos would get on the open market.
While TPS would love to pat itself on the back for getting pistols “off the street,” Morelli insists they overpaid for guns that had nowhere else to go.
“This is obviously part of a collection. They are all of the same type and prohibited,” Morelli said in an interview.
Some collectors who were licensed and legally-owned certain types of guns prior to the Liberal gun control legislation enacted in 1995 were grandfathered and allowed to keep those guns.
But since they can only sell to similarly licenced people, Morelli said the market is diminishing and most of the pistols in the photo would fetch between $50 and $150 if sold to another collector.
“He’s getting $350 for guns with diminishing value,” Morelli said.
Gun buyback programs like this are mostly about giving police a chance to grandstand and say they are doing something to get guns off the streets.
They rarely, if ever, actually get crime guns off the streets and instead collect old plinkers and guns from collectors.
Now they’ve gone a step further, they have not only overpaid, they are putting people’s safety on the line.
Someone needs to be held to account over this.
Please share this
No comments:
Post a Comment