The Founding of the Toronto Police

Toronto's police force was created the same year the city itself was incorporated. When the Town of York became the City of Toronto on March 6, 1834, the new city council organized a police establishment of five full-time constables and roughly fourteen part-time "special constables," serving a population of about 9,000 — making it one of the oldest continuously operating municipal police services in North America.

A politically controlled early force

For its first 25 years, the Toronto force was not centrally run. Individual aldermen appointed and controlled constables ward by ward, a structure that produced a politically loyal, unevenly professional body — one that was, on multiple documented occasions, used to break up opposition political meetings and that took sides during Toronto's periodic sectarian street violence in the mid-19th century.

Reform and the modern service

In 1859, control of the force — by then about 60 full-time officers — was transferred from individual aldermen to a dedicated Board of Commissioners of Police, a reform aimed at reducing ward-level political interference. That governance model, evolved over more than 160 years, is the direct institutional ancestor of today's Toronto Police Services Board. The department has since gone through several name changes tracking the city's own mergers — Metropolitan Toronto Police after 1957 regional amalgamation, and Toronto Police Service after the 1998 city amalgamation covered in our history guide.

Sources

• Peter Vronsky — History of the Toronto Police, Part 1: 1834–1857