‘You can see it on people’s faces’

Public acts of violence can have traumatic effect on entire community

Shooting leaves the city reeling from another collective trauma,

Tommy Taylor didn’t see the shooter or hear the shots on Sunday night — he was a couple of blocks away at Danforth and Carlaw — but the 38-year-old shelter worker watched the panicked aftermath up close: terrified people running from the scene, followed by sirens and swarms of police cars.

He thought immediately of April’s van attack in North York, when, as a trained crisis counsellor, he rushed to Yonge St. to offer support to those who had witnessed that chaotic rampage. His mind also turned to the spike in gun violence this summer. On Monday, Taylor considered the toll all of this has taken on Toronto’s collective psyche.

“This city has been repeatedly wounded in a very short period of time,” he said. “It’s a very tangible trauma. You can feel it. You can see it on people’s faces.”

Public acts of violence — particularly those as shocking and apparently random as Sunday’s shooting on the Danforth — can have a traumatic effect not only on victims and witnesses, but on everyone who lives in a city, according to psychologists who have studied the impact of high-profile violence on communities.

These kinds of events can irrevocably alter someone’s world view and forever change how they feel in a particular corner of the city, said Sheila A.M. Rauch, a psychologist and associate professor at Emory University’s School of Medicine. “Anyone who hears about it can be affected by simply not feeling safe anymore in places where they used to feel safe.”

For most people, those feelings will gradually recede and they will be able to resume their normal routines, but they may never feel the same sense of safety and security in those places, Rauch said.

At the same time, our feelings don’t always reflect reality, said Steve Joordens, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Events like Sunday night’s shooting disproportionately influence our memories and emotions, he said. In turn, they distort our perceptions.

There had been 220 shootings in the city as of last week, according to the latest Toronto police data. That’s compared to 201 at this point in 2016 and 196 last year. There have been 58 homicides so far this year — including the two deaths on the Danforth Sunday and the 10 in April’s van attack — compared to 43 at this point in 2016 and 24 in 2017.

Compared to other major cities in North America, Toronto has among the lowest rates of violent crime.

“There’s a natural human tendency that when these horrible things happen, they really stick in our minds,” Joordens said.

“The actual probability of something bad happening will feel higher to us than it actually is because these things come to mind so easily. So we feel that Toronto is less safe than it actually is, at least on that emotional level.”

Joordens said it’s “perfectly reasonable” for Torontonians to believe the city is generally safe, while at the same time feeling a heightened sense of anxiety over the recent violent events. “Even if we have all this rational data behind us, the emotional part of us is more fearful because those things come to our mind more quickly.”

Speaking at a press conference at police headquarters on Monday afternoon, Bonnie Levine, the executive director of Victim Services Toronto, encouraged anyone who needed support to contact them at 416808-7066.

“We know that these events have far-ranging effects,” she said, adding that Sunday’s shooting may be “re-triggering” for victims or witnesses of the van attack. “These situations really can compound the trauma.”

But while communities can be traumatized by public acts of violence, experts say they can also heal. Public memorials and opportunities for the community to come together after a traumatic event often help people to move forward.

“This is the way humans react to trauma,” Joordens said. “We use our social connections to defuse the fear and anxiety we’re feeling, by knowing that others are feeling it, by knowing they’re there for us.”

James Hawdon, director of the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech, where an infamous mass shooting occurred in 2007, studied the psychological impact of that event on the school community, and found that those who participated in memorials and public gatherings after the shooting felt better and were mentally healthier than those who had ignored them.

“The community, the solidarity that pours out after these events … that is very cathartic for the community.”

Taylor, for his part, says he still feels safe in the city, but he understands why others don’t. He said we owe it to those who were killed to try to address any underlying issues that led to the attack, whether it be access to guns, mental illness or something else.

“Toronto is a wonderful city,” he said. “But it does have wounds and those can’t heal unless we tackle these root problems properly. Thoughts and prayers are beautiful things, but they don’t heal wounds.”