Update: The two teenage girls have now been found.
Update 2: Corrected a mistake: Paisley Ray’s spreadsheet separated the men into their own tab, I missed that. Ray has created a Storify page of her tweets.
I use an app on my phone to subscribe to the Toronto Police Service’s news release updates. It’s an interesting barometer of what’s happening in the city, and perhaps a good way to catch a story or two- but most of the time it’s a lot of white noise.
There’s rarely a day when I don’t see missing persons alerts; for people of all genders, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The alerts are almost invariably followed by an announcement that the person has been found. I see so many of these messages each week that I often tell myself I should find an app that can filter them out.
The alerts turned into a minor, and questionable, controversy on Tuesday. Three women were reported missing near Queen St West and Osslington, two were teenage friends who were known to have been together; the third case was unrelated, a 40 year old Asian women. The story quickly caught the attention of the slacktivist class- outspoken radical New Brunswick feminist Kathleen Pye announced the hashtag #TorontoWomen. Everything started going downhill from that point.
