Pride Toronto has publicly called on Toronto Police to withdraw its application to march in this year’s Pride parade, citing the force’s handling of a spate of missing persons cases from the city’s Gay Village.
In a statement posted to its Facebook page on Monday night, Pride Toronto wrote that, as members of the community continued to go missing, “the investigations into their disappearances were insufficient, community knowledge and expertise was not accessed and despite the fact that many of us felt and voiced our concerns, we were dismissed.”
The statement adds that the city’s LGBTQ community’s “often tenuous trust” in the Toronto Police Service was “severely shaken.”
“We feel more vulnerable than ever,” says the letter, signed by Olivia Nuamah, executive director of Pride, and community advocates including the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention, the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention, and the Toronto People with AIDS Foundation. Andrew Kinsman, who went missing the week after the Pride parade in 2017, worked with the latter organization.
They’re literally applying because they’re petty, they can walk in plain clothes if they want to celebrate Pride-there’s enough floats they could volunteer for. They just want this because it got taken from them and they hate to lose.
They want back after Project Marie? After blaming us for not doing their groundwork for them in the Bruce McArthur killings?
Idk how they were even in it after Operation Soap, and the bathhouse 2000 raids.
This is exactly why they (and police in general) shouldn’t be allowed to walk in uniform in Pride. If your response to a marginalized group you have power over asking you to stay out of their space is to go “fuck you! I’m going to do it anyway!” you are not an ally. You are a power-tripping asshole who wants to feel special and feed your victim complex.
Also given the past year, what did the TO cops expect? It finally came out that they’d been ignoring reports and rumours of a serial killer targeting gay men for years then lied about how it’s not their fault, The Gays™ never said anything! Their homophobia and giving zero fucks about gay men not only allowed who knows how many men to be murdered, they scapegoated and gaslighted the entire community to try to cover for themselves.
