Retired Toronto homicide inspector Hank Idsinga’s new memoir about the systemic problems inside Canada’s largest police force contains disturbing allegations about the force’s persistent in-house discrimination and racism, including antisemitism. He also spells out for the first time his own family’s Jewish and Holocaust roots – a history he’s kept private for decades, while he oversaw some of the most high profile and gruesome murder cases in recent Canadian history.

Idsinga insists he did speak up about his encounters with anti-Jewish bigots while he was still carrying a badge, long before he left the force in the fall of 2023, but to no avail. That’s why despite Toronto’s police chief and other officials now vowing to investigate his evidence, Idsinga holds out little hope of seeing changes anytime soon, be it about antisemitism, anti-Black racism or other problems.

And despite recent public examples of the force’s efforts to show solidarity with Jewish employees, including holding Hanukkah candle lighting ceremonies in the lobby of police headquarters, designing a regulation police kippah, appointing a new Jewish chaplain and a Jewish liaison committee, Idsinga calls all that “window dressing”.

The veteran detective also draws a link between a unnamed senior staff member who he personally heard using antisemitic slurs, more than once, to the force’s tepid response to the violence and hate crimes targeting Canada’s largest Jewish community since Oct. 7, 2023.

In today’s wide-ranging interview with The CJN’s North Star podcast host Ellin Bessner, Idsinga shares his own family’s Holocaust trauma that saw his grandfather murdered in a gas chamber and his mother and her siblings hidden in convents. He reveals why he wanted to be a Nazi hunter before he decided to go into policing.

Related stories

Learn more about retired police inspector Hank Idsinga’s book The High Road , published this week by Simon and Schuster Canada.
Read Hank Idsinga’s interviews about the 2017 Honey and Barry Sherman murders, in The CJN archives .
Will the Sherman murders ever be solved? Watch our conversation from 2023 with reporter Kevin Donovan who wrote a book on the investigation which Idsinga’s division was in charge of.

Credits

Host and writer: Ellin Bessner ( @ebessner )
Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Alicia Richler (editorial director)
Music: Bret Higgins

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