More police just add fuel to fire
In the aftermath of several shootings in Toronto, the city has focused on how to deal with gang violence. In a few short days and over a long weekend, 11 people were shot in Toronto. In the busy places where Torontonians go during the summer — Queen St. W., Kensington Market, to friends’ houses — the air has been torn by the sound of bullets leaving guns.
Two young men killed outside a Queen St. nightclub — Smoke Dawg and Koba Prime — were up-and-coming rappers in the city’s increasingly influential rap scene.
It would be a mistake to put all of the recent shootings in Toronto down to just more gang violence. But Mayor John Tory did exactly that when he declared that 75 per cent of the shootings were gang-related and involved “a very complicated network of gangs in the city.” That may be true but the picture is a more complicated one with national scope.
Among non-U. S. OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, Canada ranks fourth in gun-related deaths and the majority are deaths by suicide. While overall crime rates have steadily been decreasing, violent crimes in some places have increased. Toronto gets a lot of headlines but the most dangerous city in Canada last year — when looking at violent crimes — was North Battleford, Sask., according to Maclean’s magazine’s crime rankings. In the two years before that, Grand Prairie, Alta., held the title. The rate of violent gun crime was a major factor in deeming those cities “dangerous.”
Clearly, it’s not just in Toronto. As Angela Wright, a prolific writer and advocate on gun reform has written, “When mayors and police chiefs in diverse cities like Surrey, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa and Toronto have publicly spoken about their struggles to grapple with rising gun violence, there is a problem.”
In Toronto, the mayor and the chief of police are moving quickly to reassure the public that the city is safe. Tory has stated that the Toronto Police Service is hiring 200 more officers. The plan to hire those officers predates this spate of shootings.
Nonetheless, the last thing this situation needs is more police officers. Police officers are a response to conditions that have been created by a lack of political will combined with an ongoing antipathy toward Black and racialized communities. What should be an option of last resort has become the first tool pulled from the tool box.
Report after report has affirmed that what is needed for a number of vulnerable communities, especially Black and racialized communities, is affordable, sustainable and accessible housing. Instead, the provinces and cities have played a game of tug-of-war with the futures of families. More reports still have affirmed a need for better education and programming. Those recommendations have fallen by the wayside.
Another report, reported in the Star this week and doomed to go unheeded, revealed the “cultural competence” of police officers. Delivered to Toronto police in March 2015, it found glaring gaps in how police understood their capacity to deal with Toronto’s many and diverse communities. Notably “one in seven police staff fell into a “monocultural mindset,” which includes positions of “polarization” and “denial,” which take “us versus them” perspectives and “disinterest” in other cultures and operate based on “stereotypes about the cultural ‘other.’ ” Furthermore, the new provincial conservative government has withdrawn hardfought gains in ensuring increased police oversight.
Rather than taking to heart several decades of research and recommendations connecting crime to poverty and a lack of services, we are adding 200 more matches to a burning fire and looking away.
As observed in Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness, Black communities are met with an assumption of criminality that only entrenches violence; white communities are given parks and recreation centres.
This summer promises to be a hot one. And I’m not sure we have seen any of the right answers to cool the heat of the streets.
Vicky Mochama is the national columnist for Star Metro. She writes about race, gender, politics and culture. Follow her on Twitter: @vmochama