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Newsstand: January 1, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Happy 2011, or MMXI if you’re Latin-American. In New Year news, police want more money, napped baby is returned safely, and most murders aren’t being solved.
As a wise band once said, all is quiet on New Year’s Day. You should know, however, that the balmy global warming–style temperatures we’re seeing this morning will drop below zero by tonight, so if you’re standing in a puddle all afternoon, you could get frozen into it.
So much for efficiencies. Police chief Bill Blair will be asking City Hall for a 3% budget increase in 2011, a number that excludes raises from upcoming salary negotiations with some Toronto Police Service employees. The request would cost the Ford administration some twenty-six million unexpected dollars in a year when campaign promises assume that city departments will reduce budgets across the board. With the Toronto Public Library already considering cuts, possible synergies include having Emergency Task Force vans double as bookmobiles and letting police act as heavily armed ambassadors of literacy to priority neighbourhoods.
This story defies adequate description in a quick blurb, but we’ll give it a shot. A New York–based model and singer, Michelle Marie Goupal, is alleged to have kidnapped a newborn baby while holding phony auditions for a Bollywood style movie. After convincing an electrician to help her secure a studio space, she rounded up a number of parents and kids before police say she walked out of the building with someone else’s newborn around 11 p.m. on Thursday. Sources says Goupaul had been telling friends for several months that she was pregnant. The child was recovered safely and Goupaul was taken into police custody.
A Toronto man has been hit with fifty-one charges related to a series of break-and-enters in the College and Spadina area. The suspect., Emmanuel Sousa, was not a proponent of the “cat burglar” style of break-in, with his alleged method of entry in a recent theft described as “(smashing) the front glass door of a restaurant with a rock.”
And since we’re on crimewatch, the Star notes that while the number of murders in Toronto has remained relatively stable, the clearance rate (percentage solved) has declined to an all-time low of 44%. The trend is attributed to a rise in the number of gun crimes, which leave less forensic evidence, and in gang-related crimes, which leave witnesses less likely to come forward.