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You might recall our story from earlier this month following my visit to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario store at 1750 The Queensway in west-end Toronto.

I was off-duty and minding my own business and not looking for trouble – but trouble found me.

Thieves entered the store, brazenly filled their sacks with several bottles of booze, and then made their getaway. I filmed the crime on my cellphone and gave chase until one of the thieves brandished a vial of dog spray.

Nevertheless, I was able to get the licence plate number: CB 39133, which was affixed to a white Chevrolet van.

I then shared that information with the store clerks.

In the aftermath, given the video evidence and the plate number, we wanted to know how the police investigation is going.

But get this: we don’t even know if the LCBO reached out to police in the first place!

Nobody at the store would provide us with any information when we revisited the store earlier this week.

And when we paid a visit to the nearby Toronto Police Service 22 Division to file our own report, we were told to phone it in!

Just one hitch: we had already spent an hour on the phone a few days earlier trying to do that and we were unable to connect with a human being.

And it seems we’re not the only one to hit such a roadblock. Another citizen was at 22 Division also hoping to report a theft over $10,000. He too was given a non-emergency number to call. He stated that he had also previously called that number several times, spending more than four hours without successfully connecting to a police officer. His concerns were met with a shrug.

It gets worse: we did some detective work for ourselves and discovered the van is registered to a home in Brampton. We informed Peel Regional Police about this, but were told that since the crime occurred in Toronto, it was out of their jurisdiction. And when we wanted to share this information with 22 Division – you guessed it – we were told to phone it in!

Unbelievable…

Now we are left pondering: does anyone care about the out-of-control theft occurring at the so-called Liquor “Control” Board of Ontario?

Well, if you are an Ontarian, you should care given that you have skin in the game in that the LCBO is a Crown corporation. And it is unacceptable that an estimated $77 million worth of booze is being pilfered each year.

Perhaps crime is so serious and so frequent in the GTA these days that unless a homicide is involved it would appear that the cops have better things to do. R.I.P., Toronto the Good.

Postscript: one friendly police officer took pity on us and decided to try to get 22 Division to act on our information. The best he could do was provide us with a website portal called the Citizen Internet Crime Report. We shall try our luck with that; hopefully the website works better than the phone system.

Stay tuned…