Toronto police officer ordered to remove ‘Punisher’ patch from uniform

Toronto police say an officer faces internal discipline after he was seen wearing a patch on his uniform with the message: “Make no mistake, I am the sheepdog” and a black skull in the middle of the emblem.

The skull appears to resemble the logo of the Punisher, a vigilante crime fighting character from Marvel Comics that has been adopted as a pro-police symbol in recent years.

The officer was seen at a news conference outside Keelesdale Public School on Tuesday morning intended to draw attention to road safety issues as students go back to school.

“The officer wearing the patch has been identified and he has been directed to remove it immediately,” Toronto police spokesperson Meaghan Gray told the Star in an email.

“It is not approved, nor appropriate, for him to be wearing it on his uniform. This is now a matter of internal discipline, and as a result I am unable to offer anything further.”

In the statement, Gray didn’t identify the officer, citing the Police Services Act. Gray added that police were “aware of the ongoing discussion on social media related to this issue.”

After the Star’s Ben Spurr tweeted a photo of the patch, “the Punisher” started to trend on Twitter.

There’s also a small Canadian flag with a blue line across the middle in the patch worn by the Toronto police officer.

A smiliar version, with the American flag crossed by a single blue stripe, has been used in the U.S. as a pro-police image symbolizing “the thin blue line.”

The phrase on the Toronto police officer’s patch appears to be part of a longer motto, “I may walk among the sheep, but make no mistake, I am the sheepdog.”

A U.S. website selling a shirt with the full motto and the American flag offers customers a chance to “support law enforcement” by buying the product.

“The message is to spread that law enforcement officers stand between the community and chaos,” the website says.

U of T criminologist Scot Wortley was surprised that the Toronto officer was able to “get away” with wearing any kind of emblem on his uniform.

Wortley questioned what message the patch’s logo was trying to send.

“If this was a message associated with punishing criminals, that is inconsistent with the role of what the police actually is,” he said. “The role of the police is not to punish. The role of the police is to enforce the law and bring people into the justice system.”

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In recent months, the logo has been used by law enforcement, including officers policing George Floyd demonstrations in the United States over the summer, according to a story on the news.artnet.com website.

To Wortley, the patch signifies a sort of “opposition to the protest movement and a kind of defiant mentality.”

He also hopes that this instance involved “one rogue officer who is sympathetic to what was going on in the United States and is not symptomatic of what most Toronto Police Service officers feel.”

In June, Gerry Conway, the co-creator of the Punisher character, put out a call to young comic book artists of colour to participate in a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter to “reclaim the Punisher skull as a symbol of justice rather than lawless police oppression.”

Irelyne Lavery is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star’s radio room in Toronto. Reach her via email: [email protected]