The police will be there immediately – in more than two hours

Globe and Mail

09-07-2025

Last year, a Toronto police officer speaking at a community event suggested that residents leave their car keys by their front door to avoid violent confrontations with potential home invaders. The implication was that break-and-enters in the area were simply going to happen – home invasions and auto theft occurrences had risen 400 per cent the previous year, according to the Toronto Police Service – so it was best to give the criminals what they wanted: your car.
The suggestion immediately went viral; it became a meme, a punchline, and a tacit admission that law enforcement could not protect you, your home or your property. But the most grating thing about the suggestion was that it was actually good advice. The reality in big cities like Toronto was – and arguably still is – that police cannot keep up, so leaving your car keys by your front door was a logical way to mitigate your risk of bodily harm from intruders. You could've still tried to call 9-1-1, but you might have been put on hold. The police would be dispatched, but that year, at least in Toronto, it took on average 20 minutes for them to arrive. And if the perpetrators were eventually caught, they'd likely be released on bail anyway. So, yeah, might as well just leave your keys by the front door.
Various metrics have improved since then. Auto thefts are down roughly 20 per cent nationally, though they're still unacceptably high, especially in Alberta and regions in Ontario. Police response times are down (by an impressive seven minutes on average in Toronto), but the police themselves still say that they cannot keep up. And visible signs of disorder and dysfunction – homelessness (which doubled in Toronto over the last three years), open drug use (a growing problem in cities like Victoria) and brazen crimes like carjackings (which doubled in the York region of Ontario last summer) – fuel perceptions of social breakdown. And when people feel as though society has broken down, they take the law into their own hands.
In Ottawa last week, a man apprehended a robbery suspect who was in the process of demanding cash from an employee at a Pet Valu (one that he had allegedly robbed about a week earlier). People in the store called 9-1-1 multiple times after the suspect was detained, but it took police over two hours to arrive at the scene. The Ottawa Police Service subsequently released a statement saying it 'appreciated the public's vigilance,' but added that it does 'not encourage citizens to attempt arrests. If you witness a crime in progress, please call police immediately.' The statement did not mention whether the response time for a crime-in-progress would be less than two hours.
In Oakville, Ont. last month, a family whose home was targeted for the second time in less than a month chased off intruders using baseball bats and a fire extinguisher. The homeowners said that after they were targeted the first time, they started sleeping with the objects in their bedroom. A week before that, a homeowner in Vaughan, Ont. was charged for firing his gun when he spotted five suspects attempting to steal his car. In February, two people were shot dead during a home invasion near Cornwall, Ont., though police noted that the residents of the home were uninjured. It is not hard to infer what happened there.
Certain crime rates are indeed improving. But people don't care about statistics when their cars disappear from their driveways, or they hear about their neighbours chasing intruders with baseball bats. There are too many reports of people on probation or released on bail offending over and over again; too many reports of police arriving too late on the scene, or not arriving at all. The cumulative effect is a fundamental breakdown in trust between the public, police and the wider justice system. When that trust breaks down, people take safety and the law into their own hands.
The most innocuous consequence is that people leave their car keys by their front doors so that intruders will enter and leave. But a more precarious effect is people form vigilante squads, try to apprehend suspects in the midst of a crime or even seek licenses to possess firearms (notably, the number of Canadians with firearms licenses rose four per cent from 2022 to 2023, and 2.5 per cent from 2023 to 2024). On Christmas Eve 2023, in Fort Langley, B.C., a group of fathers decided to patrol their neighbourhood to track down a man wanted in a spate of thefts in the area. They caught the suspect.
We cannot fault individuals for feeling as though the onus is on them to protect themselves. But we can try can to tackle the reasons why they feel that way in the first place.