Ottawa Citizen - December 26, 2007

 

Toronto's murder rate surpasses "Year of the Gun"

By Lee Greenberg

 

oronto - The stray bullet that struck and killed 15-year-old Jane Creba while she was shopping on a busy downtown street on Boxing Day 2005, left an indelible mark on the psyche of Canada's largest city.

In Toronto, 2005 is still known as The Year of The Gun.

Yet two years later, murder rates have spiked to even higher levels.

Rosemary Gartner, a criminologist at the University of Toronto, says in the past Toronto has typically seen about 60 murders a year.

For the first time in more than 20 years, however, those numbers have spiked in two of the past three years, to 78 in 2005 and 82 so far in 2007.

"I am concerned that if we get another year over 80, that's suggesting it's something we need to pay attention to," said Gartner.

Over the past decade (ending in 2005), she said, 45 per cent of homicide victims were black, a 300-per-cent increase over the decade before.

And they are not strangers to each other: 80 per cent of all victims tended to know their killers.

"The growing availability of guns means more people are going to be willing to arm themselves for self-protection," she said. "Well, if you're arming yourself because you're afraid the other guy has a gun, you may also use it first because you're afraid the other guy has a gun. So there may be this sort of escalation effect going on."

Pastor Al Bowen, an activist in the city's black community, attributes much of the violence to a moral breakdown precipitated by the absence of father figures for many young men. In Toronto's "neighbourhoods" - a term he uses to describe complexes run by the city's social housing agency - many young men turn to street thugs for guidance.

"In the black community we used to admire Martin Luther King," he says. "Now it's 50 Cent."

Kevin Stolarick, an urban theorist who has collaborated with author Richard Florida to develop a ranking system for the most innovative and successful U.S. cities, says Toronto's numbers are "phenomenally wonderful" compared to equivalent cities south of the border. The murder rate in Toronto this year will be slightly more than three per 100,000 people. Detroit's murder rate in 2004 was 42, while Washington's was 36.

"Part of what brought about any kind of significant change in Washington, D.C., or in New York was when it got to the point that it was in everybody's face," says Stolarick. "When the murder problem starts impacting on the tourist that's coming from Kansas, then it's a huge deal."

Urban scholar Joel Kotkin says inevitably, the killing will spill over into the city's core.

"A lot of the Toronto establishment, if you want to put it that way, sees itself as this hip cool thriving city doing so much better than many American cities," says Kotkin. Increasingly, Toronto is a domain of the very rich and very poor, he says, as the middle class and the jobs they create migrate to the suburbs. Violent crime is a major part of that migration.

"I mean, (crime in Toronto) hasn't reached the level of New York in the 1970s," he said. "(But) people talk about crime when they talk about Toronto now, where it was a non-issue not so long ago."

Yet in many ways, Torontonians are paying less attention than they were in the wake of the Creba murder, according to some observers.

One reason might be the departure of former Toronto police chief Julian Fantino, who got a bigger budget for cops and prosecutors by making the city's guns-and-gangs problem a front-page story at every opportunity. Two years later, new police Chief Bill Blair is urging the public to "step back a bit" from keeping what he calls a "misleading" running tally.

He says gun homicides are down from 2005, while domestic slayings and murder-suicides are up. He nevertheless expressed "great concern" over the numbers earlier this fall, adding: "We're doing everything we can do to reduce violence in our city."

The message to Torontonians, according to Gartner, is that everyone can relax a little.

"The police are saying it's not the case that Torontonians in general are at risk," she says. "If you're not dealing drugs, if you're not in this particular violent youth culture, your risks are absolutely minimal. And in some respects that is probably true. I mean, I'm a white, 55-year-old woman. My risks of homicide have not changed over time. They're absolutely minuscule in Toronto."

At the same time, she says, there's a risk to people thinking the violence is "just bad guys killing bad guys."

"I would worry about people becoming complacent."

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