“The day after 9/11, we knew we needed to reach out to the city’s diverse cultural communities,” he recounted. “We went to the faith leaders, secular leaders and business leaders of these communities and tried to build relationships of trust.”
It took time. It took work. It took openness on both sides. The strongest partnership the police developed, Blair said, was with the Muslim community.
It was instrumental in the arrest of the Toronto 18 — all radicalized young Islamic men — five years later.
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But if all that “reaching out” had really been a success…
You wouldn’t have ended up with 18 “radicalized young Islamic men” to arrest “five years later.”
