A PUBLIC’S RIGHT TO KNOW

TOUGH QUESTIONS NEED ANSWERING ABOUT THE RESPONSE TO THE DANFORTH SLAUGHTER

There are many elements in the response to the Danforth slaughter in Toronto worth consideration, some involving communications with the public, some on the various debates that are arising. Here are just three.

THE SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS UNIT (SIU)

Ontario’s SIU is called in when a police officer shoots a civilian. In the greater part of such episodes — bank robberies, gang arrests etc. — this is entirely a good thing. Was the fired shot necessary? Did the police overreact?

In the far more abnormal circumstances of the mass shooting on the Danforth, the insistence on this protocol took on preposterous dimensions. The SIU role was prioritized over the investigation itself for the first two or three days. The chief of police held back on even minimal explanation or reports to the public until the SIU completed its review — all of this in an event that everyone described as “shaking the entire city” — leaving the public in a deep valley of officially enforced ignorance, the chief a sideline spokesman during the most horrific episode of its kind that Toronto has perhaps ever seen.

What, of this outrage, was there for the SIU to investigate? If police had arrived at the scene of a man, armed and carrying enough ammunition to make a full night of mayhem and murder, already having shot 14 people, killing two of those — one aged 18, one 10 years old — and then did NOT shoot him, absolutely as soon as they could, there would infallibly be a need for an investigation.

On the actual night however, the shooter was shot dead (as it turns out, he was felled by his own gun, the CBC has reported, quoting a police source). Either way, there was no possible “fault” to be determined. He was dead, and therefore further maimings and deaths were prevented. And which party was responsible, police or shooter, while not irrelevant, was one of the lesser considerations, by far, in the investigation of the entire incident. It was at best a purely secondary, not lead, matter.

So why it was accorded such an overriding priority, and why it led to the chief of police, and the mayor, deferring to the SIU as the lead authority, forestalling any substantial communications to the greater public, passes all understanding.

The event was much larger than SIU protocols, which were devised for far less consequential, more localized interactions, than an exceptional criminal outbreak — the attempted mass slaughter of citizens on the Danforth.

THE GUN BAN

Up until that horrid night, Toronto had been consumed with a torrent of nearly daily shootings, in a playground, on the night streets of the entertainment district, on highways, outside clubs — one wounding a five-yearold girl at play — most of which were a subset of gang violence. Being such, it is as close to a certainty as a certainty can be, that the guns involved were illegal. (Not “irregular,” I should note, as that is being accepted in some quarters as a synonym, which it is not and never will be.) In other words, the guns in those crimes were almost certainly not “legal.” And neither was — and this is no “by the way” — the action of shooting to kill other people.

As a response, therefore, to the multiple “regular” shootings, and especially to the exceptional violence that night on the Danforth, what is the possible logic to now screaming for a ban on all handguns in the city?

Let me be explicit. I am not, in this instance, making some point about “gun rights” per se. That’s actually another debate altogether. I’m asking the question: If there are people who, almost as a matter of course, are willing to ignore the statutes against murder or attempted murder, and who feel no compunction about shooting up a city playground during the day when children are at play, will such persons feel a cold wind blowing over them and forsake their criminal ways because something called a “gun ban” is brought down by city council?

The only real contribution this talk of a total handgun ban — and I’m not being sarcastic — will make to Toronto’s gang violence problem, is giving politicians something to sound strong about, and the gangs who use guns already illegal something to laugh at.

It would also make a fine study to check, say, over the past four weeks, how many times the phrase “gun violence” has been used by Mayor John Tory, Premier Doug Ford and federal politicians, and how many times it has been heard on news reports, and compare that number with how many iterations the phrase “gang violence” — the real precipitating factor — has received. One hundred to one would be my guess. Gang violence is a “sensitive” topic; gun violence is an easy banner.

THE FAMILY STATEMENT

One day after the attack, the SIU released the shooter’s name, and immediately on the heels of that announcement, a statement, we were told from the family, was issued. As revealed by Anthony Furey of the Toronto Sun, it was written by a third party, a local NDP activist, and as could be seen from its prose, it was a polished and composed exercise offering several considerations about the shooter — the main burden of which was that he was chronically “mentally ill,” even to “psychosis.” It came, it should also be noted, while the Toronto police were still imposing a starvation diet of information on the events of that night, replete with calls to “hold off on all speculation” till the facts were in. Calls that were to a real degree undermined by the police’s reluctance to offer hardly any real information whatsoever, thus leaving a vacuum for the very sorts of wild and unworthy speculation they were cautioning against.

Who invited whom to issue the statement is not known — did the family call, or were they called? Likewise there has been no — so far as we know — corroboration of what the statement contained. It is not a denial of sympathy to the parents of the shooter in an event of this scale to seek such corroboration and, at a minimum, to ask whether the statement issued in the family’s name had any secondary purpose. Was it meant to “frame the debate” exclusively in terms of mental illness? If such was the purpose, it has been quite successful, as except for the generalized and necessarily vague talk of “gun violence” (which hardly fits an attempt at the mass killing of strangers) most of the talk and response has been on just that subject. Which is most unjust to both the topic of mental illness and the number of people who are desolated by it.

This is unfortunate. A very great effort has been undertaken in these past few years to educate the public about the great range of mental illnesses — it is not a homogeneous condition. It has a great range of manifestations, and in almost all of them if there is a “victim,” it is the sad person who is mentally ill. Because mental illness is a delicate topic, decent people do not like or wish to insist, nor in ordinary circumstances should they, on publicly asking for the details of a particular sufferer, or intruding on a family that is dealing with one of their own so afflicted.

But this is not an ordinary moment. And a statement of this kind from a family caught up in such a dreadful circumstance, written by a third party, is unusual, too. The statement should not circumscribe asking the necessary questions, nor should it delimit full inquiry into the particular circumstances of Faisal Hussain’s actions. All wish to sympathize with those members of the family who were not agents in his deeds.

That sympathy does not preclude rigorous inquiry into an event that saw a 10-yearold girl savagely taken from life and love, an 18-year-old woman ripped from family and friends in the very dawn of her adulthood, 12 others maimed and traumatized, and an entire city blasted by anxiety and grief.