Toronto Police Service
police agency servicing Toronto, Canada
The Toronto Police Service (TPS) is a municipal police force in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and the primary agency responsible for providing law enforcement and policing services in Toronto. Established in 1834, it was the first local police service created in North America and is one of the oldest police services in the English-speaking world.
It is the largest municipal police service in Canada, and the fourth largest police force in Canada after Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Sûreté du Québec (SQ), and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). With a 2023 budget of $1.16 billion, the Toronto Police Service ranks as the second largest expense of the City of Toronto's annual operating budget, after the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC).
History
19th century
The City of Glasgow Police (c.1800, merged to form Strathclyde Police in 1975) and London Metropolitan Police (1829) were the first modern municipal police departments, but the Toronto Police is older than the New York City Police Department (1845), and Boston Police Department (1839). It is the second-oldest continuously operating municipal police force in the world.
The Toronto Police Service was founded in 1834 as Toronto Police Force or sometimes as Toronto Police Department, when the city of Toronto was first created from the town of York. Before that, local able-bodied male citizens were required to report for night duty as special constables for a fixed number of nights per year on penalty of fine or imprisonment, in a system known as "watch and ward".
In 1835, Toronto retained five full-time constables—a ratio of about one officer for every 1,850 citizens. Their daily pay was set at 5 shillings for day duty and 7 shillings, 6 pence, for night duty.
The public source identifies “Toronto Police Service” as police agency servicing Toronto, Canada. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Toronto, Police and Service.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1521097. Authority coordinates are 43.662, -79.385. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1834, 2023, 1800 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Toronto Police Service” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.