Current and former Police Services Board members are split on whether Mayor John Tory acted appropriately when he expressed the Sherman family’s concerns to the Toronto police chief about the investigation into Barry and Honey Sherman’s deaths.Sherman family members relayed concerns to Tory that they were finding out information about the investigation in the media before hearing it from police, the mayor’s spokesperson Don Peat said in an email.Tory, a member of the police board, informed Chief Mark Saunders of the family’s concerns “dispassionately” and did not make any requests to police, the statement said.“It is not unusual for the Mayor to talk to grieving families to offer condolences… he listens to their concerns and relays those concerns to the relevant city department or agency,” Peat wrote in the email.The bodies of Barry and Honey Sherman were found Dec. 15 inside their home at 50 Old Colony Rd. where police continued to investigate on Thursday. The cause of death has been deemed ligature neck compression and an investigation is ongoing to determine further information about the circumstances surrounding their deaths.Tory’s actions fall within a grey area of the Police Services Act, which governs all board members, said former police services board chair Alok Mukherjee.What Tory did for the Sherman family “creates the impression that a prominent family has special access to policing services,” said Mukherjee, who retired from the Police Services Board in 2015, and became a visiting professor at Ryerson University’s department of criminology and office of equity, diversity and inclusion.“Whether this is true or not does not matter. Not every family or person has the ability to get the city’s mayor to be their spokesperson on a police investigation.”Under the Act, no board member is allowed to give orders or directions to any member of the police force, or d ...
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