Toronto Police Chief Effectively Says That The Rob Ford Crack Video Exists, and That He’s Seen It

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair at the press conference.

As I write this, Accordion City’s chief of police Bill Blair is being as by-the-book as he can be while effectively saying once and for all that the video featuring our Peter Griffin-esque is real, and that he’s seen it. In a press conference before some understandably scandal-hungry reporters, he said that:

“The Toronto Police Service is now in possession of a video digital file”

and that it contains

“images consistent with those reported in the press”

Or simply put: Gawker and the Toronto Star weren’t lying. The “Rob Ford Smoking Crack” video is real.

Toronto’s worst mayor ever and his skeevy friends became the subject of an investigation in the wake of the news about a video allegedly (how much longer will I have to write “allegedly”?) showing him smoking a crack pipe. Ford took about a week to issue a statement about the video, and when he finally did, he avoided issuing a direct denial, stating “I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist”. With an equal degree of indirectness, the Chief of Police says that it does exist. My guess is that the next few days at City Hall will be very interesting, as will the next few days at Toronto’s rabidly pro-Ford (at least until recently) low-information-reader newspaper of choice, the Toronto Sun, and the unintentionally hilarious I Hate the War on Mayor Rob Ford Facebook page.

The press conference comes on the heels of the release of a 500-page document on Project Brazen 2, which sounds like a bad direct-to-video movie, but was actually a police investigation. Earlier, it was believed that Sandro Lisi, a skeevy friend of the mayor, was the target of the investigation, but the document seems to suggest that the true target was the mayor himself. This document, which is heavily redacted in place, covers 349 phone calls and several meetings between Lisi and Ford, one of which involved that classic movie trope, the exchange of a manila envelope.

The document also includes these surveillance photos:

Here’s the video of the press conference held by the Toronto Police Service earlier today at 11:30 a.m.:

I’ve got to hand it to Chief Blair: he’s being a consummate professional about it. He’s simply stating the facts, and reminding the public that the polcie’s job is to gather evidence, make arrests where necessary, and present their finding to the courts, and doing so fairly, or as he puts it several times, “without fear or favour”. In the meantime, the so-called journalists keep asking immaterial questions like “Are you shocked?”

This should be an interesting couple of weeks here in Toronto. I won’t be around for them, though: I’m off to San Francisco next week, and Vegas the next, but I’m sure by then, it’ll be all over the American news and fodder for late-night comedy shows.