In Local News

Remember that clock radio next to your bed, and the half-awake news every morning? Especially the local stuff, like the story of the flasher, who for the past three years had been prowling the paths of High Park?

     A group of west-end women had given up on the police and gone to the press. It was the same guy, they knew, because of his particular routine of hiding in the bushes and whistling a birdsong to get their attention. They put up posters declaring “We know who you are and what you look like.”

     They called him the Whistling Pervert.

But in that funny-not-funny moment, we also learned that the guy had been getting more brazen, and that some women had talked about arming themselves.

     This and some casual threats of vigilante justice was all that it took—after years of complaints, and what the police had dared call an “intensive investigation”—to get them to actually start beating the bushes and maybe dress up some female constables to flush the guy out.

     And so it was, just one week later, that Toronto awoke to the news that the cops had arrested not one, not two, but four whistling perverts.

Inspired by The Good Doctor. Photo by the author.