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A safe city?
In the wake of the shootings in the food court at Toronto’s Eaton Centre Saturday night, everyone from the mayor to police detectives to the editorial writers at all the dailies have hastened to assure a “fearful” public that they really have nothing to fear. This was an isolated incident, an “idiot with a gun”. Just go about your business as if nothing had happened. Rob Ford even went so far as to say that his city was “the safest in the world”. We’re not sure what criteria he’s using, but we would suggest there is ample evidence to refute his assertion.
Of course the citizens of Toronto will go about their daily business; what choice have they got? In doing so, they know they could get run over by a delivery van mounting a curb, or crushed by a tire that flies off another vehicle on the 401, or bitten by a rabid raccoon in High Park. And now they’ve also been reminded that they could get killed by a stray bullet from a gang member who’s blind to anything but the immediate target of his anger, just as Jane Creba was six years ago.
Compared to cities of a comparable size in many other parts of the world (Mexico and Iraq spring to mind), Toronto is “safe”, but it is far from being the safest. Mr. Ford would only have to take a quick glance at the statistics for most European large cities, for instance, to realize how ridiculous his claim is. And although violent crime has been on a slow decine since the “Summer of the Gun” that claimed Creba, these things tend to go in cycles. This year, the number of crimes, and deaths, involving guns is up again sharply. Police may contend that most of the incidents are gang members attacking each other, but as Saturday’s event so horrifyingly demonstrated, that is far from being any shield from harm.
Until Toronto and GTA police (and their political masters) redouble their efforts to get rid of gangs (and combat the root causes of gang culture), and even more important, get guns off the street (the food court scene would have been radically different if a knife had been the weapon of choice), no one is going to take them seriously when they their city is safe. Joe Citizen may suppress his fear when he moves about the city, but it doesn’t mean the fear isn’t there. And, whatever the patronizing platitudes of police and politicians, Joe has every right to be afraid.
July 14, 2011
