Bradford says families are "counting the minutes" waiting for 911. That wait was cut in half two years ago.

His numbers are right. His story isn’t.

Between 20 and 26 July, Bradford made one argument across four posts: Toronto’s police are dangerously understaffed, the current administration has done nothing, and 1,000 new officers are the fix.

The numbers underneath are real. Toronto has the lowest officers-per-resident ratio of any large Canadian city, about 163 per 100,000 in 2023 and roughly 171 now. The population has grown by about 600,000 since 2010 on a nearly flat headcount. He even concedes, once, that cop-to-pop is “an imperfect metric.”

Everything he builds on those numbers points where the evidence doesn’t.

The 911 wait he invokes was cut in half two years ago

The pledge opens: “Families deserve to know they won’t be counting the minutes after calling 911.”

That described 2023. Priority 1 response, the most urgent calls, has since collapsed:

October 2023	26.7 minutes, the peak
Early 2024	19.6 minutes
March 2025	12.6 minutes, then at or below ~13 for four straight months

A 12.6-minute wait is not nothing, and “our response times should be better” would stand. But the claim is deployed as the reason to change course, and the “status quo” he says isn’t enough is exactly what halved the number, on the flat headcount he calls the problem.

The ratio got worse. The service got better. His posts carry only the first half.

His chart turns 78% of Montreal’s rate into 30%

The pledge graphic, headed “City Hall UNDERSTAFFED Toronto Police,” compares four cities using real figures. Then it starts its axis at 150 instead of zero, cutting the bottom 150 units off every bar and roughly tripling the visible differences.

	Montreal	Vancouver	Edmonton	Toronto
Figure shown	220	195	190	171
Bar as drawn, vs Montreal	100%	64%	57%	30%
Actual share of Montreal’s rate	100%	89%	86%	78%

Toronto staffs at 78% of Montreal’s rate. The chart shows a third. This is the one element of the campaign that can’t be read as emphasis or omission: correct numbers, drawn to misstate their relationship.

The fix he skips is one he voted for

Toronto didn’t halve its 911 waits by hiring. It mostly stopped sending police to calls that never needed them.

The Toronto Community Crisis Service, now the city’s fourth emergency service, resolved 78% of its calls with no officer involved at all (March 2022 to December 2024, with 2025 projected near 84%), on 2 to 3% of the police budget.

	Cost	Delivers
143 net new officers (2026 budget)	$20.5M/year	≈$143,000 per officer, recurring
Toronto Community Crisis Service	≈2 to 3% of the police budget	78% of its calls closed with no officer dispatched

Diversion has a ceiling, since it can’t absorb violent crime or run investigations, but nobody has shown Toronto is at it, and city staff have recommended expanding it further.

And in October 2025, council voted 23-1 to extend the service to the TTC. Bradford voted yes. Nine months later: four posts on police capacity, no mention of the cheaper lever he helped expand.

$143 million a year to overshoot a range the current plan already meets

Bradford hasn’t costed the pledge. His campaign will “roll those numbers out later in the campaign.”

The city’s budget does it for him. At the 2026 rate of $20.5 million for 143 net new officers, about $143,000 each and recurring, 1,000 officers runs on the order of $143 million a year, permanently. That is consistent with Councillor Shelley Carroll’s estimate of over $100 million.

Two harder problems sit underneath:

• The pledge outruns the training pipeline. Netting 1,000 officers in a four-year term means recruiting at least ~470 a year once separations (~217 and rising, per TPS’s own projections) are replaced. The police college caps at roughly 360 a year, and the plan he calls insufficient already uses all of it. Read as promised, on top of the existing plan, the arithmetic needs ~610 a year.
• The spending buys an overshoot. Toronto’s defensible staffing band, worked back from service levels, is roughly 170 to 185 per 100,000. The existing plan reaches ~172 by 2029, inside the band. His 1,000 puts Toronto near 200: Montreal’s rate, without Montreal’s crime.

The file isn’t closed. Holding 172 as the city grows takes continued hiring, and 12.6 minutes was a good-season reading. But that is what the existing plan already does. What the extra $143 million a year buys, on the city’s own numbers, is staffing past the range the service data supports, through a college that cannot train the officers on the schedule promised, while the lever that actually cut response times runs on 2 to 3% of the police budget.

The peer cities are doing different jobs

London’s 375 officers per 100,000 includes national counter-terrorism command, royalty and diplomatic protection, and national fraud policing. New York’s 414 counts roughly 5,000 school safety agents and 4,000 traffic agents. Toronto shares rail, cyber, terrorism and border work with federal and provincial agencies and counts none of it.

Divide by crime instead of population and the ranking flips: roughly 55 officers per 1,000 Criminal Code incidents in Toronto, against about 44 in Montreal and 25 in Vancouver. One caveat cuts back. Understaffed forces record less crime, so treat that as an upper bound. The direction is still clear: Toronto’s low cop-to-pop mostly reflects low crime.

His strongest argument is the one with no numbers

The announcement video argues something the response-time recovery can’t answer: burnout. Double shifts, “answering the calls alone that used to get two cars,” officers trained in Toronto and lost “to forces that aren’t running on empty.”

That case is real. A service can hit its emergency targets on overtime and single-officer dispatch and still be unsustainable. It is also the only claim of the week he offers no evidence for: no attrition breakdown, no dispatch data, no overtime totals.

We checked the public data separately, and it points elsewhere. The police service attributes its attrition to retirement rather than rival forces. Rated Unsubstantiated.

The Chow claim got its own rating too

“Every chance Mayor Chow has had to take action on public safety, she’s decided not to”, posted four days before the pledge, is contradicted by the record, including a safety motion Bradford himself moved that Chow voted for. Rated False.

The ruling

The staffing figures are accurate, and one post hedges the metric. That is the strongest thing that can be said for the week.

Everything assembled on top points the other way. The 911 wait he invokes was halved under the plan he calls inadequate. The chart triples the gap it claims to illustrate. The diversion lever that did much of the work, one he voted to expand, never comes up.

And the money points the same way: $143 million a year, recurring and uncosted by his campaign, to overshoot the staffing range the service data supports, through a training pipeline already running at capacity.

Not false numbers. True numbers arranged, and in one case drawn, to support a conclusion they don’t support on inspection.

Misleading.