Ariyo Fakomi went into the books as Toronto homicide #0012022.

The new year was just short of being 42 hours old when Fakomi, 37, was shot to death in the Weston Rd. and Hwy. 401 area. He was a player and had a colourful criminal history related to drugs and gangs.

Fakomi was the first case in what would be a very busy January for Toronto Police homicide detectives.

The bloodbath that had seemed in the offing following a tidal wave of homicides that month never materialized.

Whoever murdered family man Gars-Ara Kourjakian on Dec. 30, 2022 in an underground parking garage in Scarborough didn’t get the memo. The interior designer was shot to death in front of his five-year-old daughter at 5:30 p.m.

Kourjakian’s slaying was the city’s 70th and last of the year. Numbers-wise, a typical year for Toronto.

As of this writing, the murder rate is down 16% from 2021. And while many other law enforcement agencies struggle to put down murder cases, the Toronto Police Service rate is more than 80% solved.

Det. Insp. Hank Idsinga said the murder rate for 2022 is about average and that his homicide unit is “staffed and well-equipped to handle 70 murders.”

“We’re about where we should be,” Idsinga told the Toronto Sun in a year-end interview.

“The clearance of these murders has been steadily increasing as a direct effect of people’s perception of community safety and that helps act as a general deterrent.”

Idsinga said, as a result, detectives are getting more cooperation from people in various communities who are directly affected by violent crime.

“People knowing that the police are there is really the very best investigative tool we have,” he said, adding that the high clearance rate “speaks to the dedication of our detectives, uniformed officers and support team.”

The veteran detective noted that homicide investigators saw an explosion of mental health-related homicides in 2020 and 2021 — the first two years of the COVID pandemic.

Last year, mental health was still a factor but less so.

“Not like we had during the height of the pandemic but it has slowed down naturally,” Idsinga said of 2022.

Over the past five years, a lot of the big city murders that had previously been kept to the confines of the GTA have now spread like a cancer to smaller communities like Thunder Bay, Sarnia and elsewhere.

“We’re seeing a lot more overlap in our investigations between GTA-area agencies, Montreal and Vancouver,” Idsinga said. “Murder has developed more a national flavour in some of our investigations.”

There’s a lot of dope dealers operating in the GTA all fighting for a piece of a shrinking pie, whereas places like the Niagara Region, Thunder Bay and other smaller burgs can be quickly turned into monopolies — through violence.

Idsinga added that he is particularly proud of the vexing cases put down by his cold case unit, led by Det. Sgt. Steve Smith. Two of the city’s most heartbreaking cold cases have been solved over the past few years.

First, in October 2020, the cold case unit announced they had finally solved the 1984 murder of 9-year-old Christine Jessop.

Then, in early December, the cold case team announced that they had solved the 1983 murder of single mom Susan Tice and heiress Erin Gilmour. According to cops, the same man is responsible for both.

“With the expansion of DNA and other new technologies, the field is growing by leaps and bounds, particularly with genetic genealogy,” Idsinga said.

Using DNA discovered at murder scenes along with the multitude of services like ancestry.com and 23andme, cops can zero in on a single family grouping, eliminating an infinite amount of legwork.

Missing persons cases also fall under Idsinga’s auspices and since serial killer Bruce McArthur’s rampage, cops have become more proactive and “we’ve taken steps to address the issue.”

As for 2023, Idsinga says he has his fingers crossed that the gun violence plaguing the city and keeping his detectives busy eases up.

“I want that every year,” Idsinga said. “But most years, murder is a cruel fact of life.”

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun