Rosie DiManno
As of Monday, 199 shootings in Toronto. But for luck, they all could have been fatal,
The first almost-killed shooting I can recall covering as a cub news reporter was on Sept. 23, 1983. The victim was Barbara Turnbull.
At that time Barb was a teenager working part-time at a Mississauga convenience store. She was 15 minutes away from flipping the closed sign, stacking cigarettes with her back turned when four bandits entered that Becker’s, intent on robbery. One of them fired a Colt .357 Magnum into Barb’s neck, severing her spine and putting her into a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
In the months to come, Barb came close to dying with recurring infections. In the years to come, despite being rendered a quadriplegic, Barb made an impressive success of her life, from class valedictorian upon graduation from the journalism school at Arizona State University to a career as a Toronto Star reporter, and an author. Our colleague passed away three years ago.
The stone coldness of that senseless shooting jolted everybody.
We’re hardly ever jolted out of apathy anymore.
It certainly isn’t often that we, in the media, keep our eyes on the ball in shootings that don’t result in murder. They’re scarcely newsworthy: a digest item, a fleeting mention on-air, unless the circumstances are exceptional.
Rarely, as in the young sisters struck by bullets on a Scarborough playground a few weeks ago, the gravity of the episode lingers. Just little girls and that was horrific, perhaps a watershed moment in Toronto violence. But probably not. Or Louise Russo, shot and left paralyzed as an innocent bystander to a botched underworld hit at a California Sandwich shop in 2004. But mostly we move on quickly because the police blotter is stuffed with shooting incidents day to day, night to night. And woundings don’t have the same news gusto as homicides. Indeed, cyclist deaths on city streets, and how to prevent them, have arguably become more of a public issue than murder.
Not that I’m weighing victims against victims.
Commonly, however, the yardstick for measuring urban crime is murder. By that reckoning Toronto has been pitched into Year of the Gun redux. On Saturday night, two more killings downtown, brazenly and recklessly, during a gunfight right in the heart and thrum of Queen St. W. A woman is in hospital in serious condition from that triple shooting. On social media, the two male victims have been identified as rappers Smoke Dawg and Koba, although police haven’t confirmed identity.
A15-year-old boy, shot on Saturday afternoon, dragged himself from a fundraising carnival at a church in the Jane/Finch area.
Predictably, criminologists remind that a statistical screen grab is an unsound big picture view, a poor indicator of actual trends and Toronto is still a remarkably safe metropolis. Just as police reassured the city as recently as a decade ago that there were no real streets gangs operating hereabouts, merely cadres of wannabes. Just like, nah, there was no serial killer preying on men in the Gay Village. Until, oh, there was.
The big 5-0 in murder tally (as of Sunday evening), almost double the number (27) at this point in 2017. Five people killed last weekend alone. On pace for a record homicide year. Fattened out, of course, by the 10 people killed in April’s van rampage on north Yonge St.
Extrapolated to murder rate per population, that’s a slightly higher kill rate than New York City, at the moment.
As of last Monday, there had been 199 shootings in Toronto — which is to say shooting incidents, which could involve a cluster of shots and more than one weapon, according to Toronto police data. The breakdown: 22 deaths, 70 injuries, 81 with no injuries, 84 unknown. Not including this weekend’s bang-bang.
Sounds of gunshot — a common police call-out. Just life in the city as usual.
Any of those shootings could have resulted in death but for blind luck. So the murder tally is somewhat misleading, as a barometer of violence. Like that cop, struck during a shootout in the parking lot of a Warden Ave. bar last month. Det.-Const. Arjuna Raveendran survived a shot to the chest because of the Kevlar vest he was wearing and the cellphone tucked into the front pocket, which was pierced by the bullet. Do you know what happens when a person is shot?
A 9 mm bullet from a handgun — just like 75 of the semi- automatic weapons (magazine cartridges) seized during the Operation Patton raids targeting the notorious Five Points Generalz Project on June 21 — travels at the speed of about 900 mph or just over 10 times faster, and harder, than an average MLB pitched fastball. Indeed, “like getting beaned by a pitch” is how some survivors have described the experience. It burns. The .357 Magnum that severed Barb’s spine travelled at nearly 1,000 mph or 1,450 feet per second. And she was standing only a few feet away when hit.
All that forward momentum has to go somewhere. So the bullet transfers it to the body, expanding and creating a large cavity before falling back on itself (if it doesn’t go throughand-through). Inside the body, a bullet can bounce, ricochet or change direction, shredding muscle, tissue and organs. A pumping heart will send large quantities of blood to the traumatized, oxygen-starved area, causing massive hemorrhaging. If the hole is quickly plugged or pressure applied — and this I learned in first aid training courses for journalists headed to combat zones — the vascular system will shoot blood from the extremities to the core, to maintain perfusion (delivery of blood to the tissue) to vital organs.
But that’s battlefield triage, where blood loss is the No. 1 preventable cause of death.
Toronto’s streets aren’t a battlefield, or at least only metaphorically, in tabloid parlance. Even if Saturday night felt a lot like it on Queen.
It really is quite remarkable that, given all the bullets flying around, more people haven’t been killed. And it really is so often a fateful roll of the dice, when a bullet either doesn’t reach its intended target or that projectile’s path misses a vital artery, a vital organ.
Amid the hand-wringing over gun carnage in our midst, Peel Police Chief Jennifer Evans told regional council on Thursday that the decision to ban street checks has directly contributed to the spike in shootings.
The controversial practice of street-carding was all but banned by the Ontario Liberal government last year, with the Black community arguing, quite rightly, that people of colour had long been disproportionately targeted. “There are more people carrying knives and guns than ever before,” Evans said.
Peel data shows that the number of bullets fired had jumped to 426 in 2017 compared to 272 the year before.
Carding, a way of collecting information allegedly useful to cops, still exists, but police are now obligated to explain to people they stop that they have a right not to talk and refusal cannot then be used against them. They must also provide a receipt documenting the encounter, include the officer’s name and badge number. I still maintain that hard cases make bad laws, that extreme situations are a lousy basis for a law applied generally. But there’s no disputing the frustration of law enforcement. Maybe a more nuanced debate does have merit.
Too much dying, way too much wounding.
And a city bleeds.