[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto police union president Mike McCormack may be the biggest dick in town"

[rfmcdonald]

NOW Toronto's Enzo DiMatteo is scathing about the president of Toronto's police union, arguing he uses his personal style to make people forget awkward and questionable things.

It was enough to make us forget, sort of, his own scrapes with the law. Like, for example, the insubor-di-nation charge stemming from an unauthorized back-ground check he conducted on a Star reporter working on a story about his big brother, Billy, also a cop, and Billy’s alleged involvement in the shakedown of bar owners in the Entertainment District. Before that there was a dis-cipline charge over Mike’s efforts to help an ex-con car salesman with ties to organized crime get back his licence to sell luxury cars. McCormack was cleared of that one.

During the Rob Ford years, McCormack hid in plain sight. After copping a lucrative four-year contract for his members, you barely heard from him, not even amid those rumblings of rank-and-file cops running interference for Ford during the crack scandal. And making sure the former mayor got home all right all those wasted nights he spent wandering around town.

Now deep into his second term as union head, the guy who couldn’t get enough of the blood-and-guts brand of policing when he wore the uniform has quite possibly become the city’s biggest dick – and he doesn’t even wear a badge. (Directors of the police union are not technically cops. They’re required to turn in their badges.)

Nowadays, McCormack is still walking around with a chip on his shoulder, spending most of his time defending rogue cops – the type he once was. Who could forget his not-so-veiled threat after Constable James Forcillo was convicted of attempted murder in the shooting death of Sammy Yatim earlier this year that the verdict would cause cops to think twice about their duty to protect the public?

We probably should have seen it coming.