Are Toronto’s kids all right?
Are the kids all right in Toronto? Judging by recent headlines, maybe not. Toronto police arrested nearly 20 young people, 10 of them minors (one only 15 years old) when violence broke out on an east end beach on the Victoria Day weekend.
The arrests were made in connection with two shootings, one stabbing, two robberies at gunpoint and various incidents of people throwing firecrackers at each other.
According to police, one officer broke a leg responding to a shooting, and another sustained “serious abrasions” to his face when someone threw a firecracker directly at him.
“This gathering came about on TikTok,” Beaches—East York councillor Brad Bradford told me Tuesday after a long stretch of talking with police and rattled residents. “I think we’ve seen that across the city — these informal gatherings where folks want to let loose. And that’s fine, if you do it in a courteous way. Lawless behaviour is unacceptable.”
But pan out from Toronto’s beaches, and the city at large is experiencing a sharp increase in “lawless behaviour,” specifically carjackings, one of which recently targeted Toronto Maple Leafs forward Mitch Marner (talk about a guy having a bad month). Again, the offenders involved in this type of crime tend to skew young.
Earlier this month, two teenage boys, one 15 and one 17 were charged with robbery with a firearm and disguise with intent. At a news conference recently, Insp. Richard Harris of the Toronto Police Service’s holdup squad said that in 2021 his unit responded to 59 carjackings for the entire year. In 2022, however, the unit has responded to 60 to date: that’s more than a year’s worth in roughly five months. According to York Regional Police, carjacking incidents have more than doubled since 2019.
It wouldn’t be far-fetched then, to predict that the coming months will bring additional headlines about very young people allegedly committing violent crimes.
What the heck is going on? Well, recently and for the last two years, a whole lot of nothing.
It’s a cop-out to blame a crime wave involving young people solely
Prof. Michael Kessler believes the city and province should invest in a youth strategy that acknowledges the specific developmental deficits borne out by the pandemic
on the emotional toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is mayhem in the Beach every summer, a problem councillor Bradford believes could be alleviated by additional police and parks resources from the city. And car theft — even a lot of it — is not a new phenomenon.
But just as it would be foolish to blame what could be an uptick in young people committing predatory crimes entirely on pandemic isolation, it would be equally foolish to rule out that influence altogether.
For example, while some point only to the economic fallout of the pandemic as a motivation for crimes like carjackings, Anna Sergi, a professor of criminology and organized crime studies at the University of Essex, points to a psychological one.
“More than just looking at the short supply of cars,” says Sergi, “I would look at the short supply in security. With the pandemic it’s difficult to feel secure, to feel safe in a job, in your prospects.”
The short-term solutions to an uptick in a crime like carjacking, says Sergi, involve environmental design, surveillance cameras and improving physical security (though she adds this “will most likely displace the crime and move it to other places in the city.”)
“The long-term answer,” she says, “is the usual answer that nobody likes.” That is, looking at the “socioeconomic roots of this type of criminality. One motivation is opportunism. It’s easy, it’s violent, it’s property related. There might be an element of emotion linked to the predatory state: feeling powerful because they can choose a type of target.”
Michael Kessler, a professor of ethics, society and law at the University of Toronto thinks it’s a mistake to assume, as some do, that juvenile offenders “are strategizing about which crimes to commit based on sentencing guidelines.”
“In terms of the psychological research, the juvenile brain is less able to incorporate concerns about the future into the present. This is something we all go through on our way to adulthood.”
But the pandemic may have slowed this process for some.
“We’ve basically had a couple of years where people have lost access to the structures that help support good development. My view is that crime fills a gap in people’s lives that’s created by missing elements like family, work, school or hobbies, and socializing. I think many young people have suffered arrested development in terms of social accountability simply because their social networks have shrunk during the last two years.”
Kessler believes the city and province should invest in a youth strategy that acknowledges the specific developmental deficits borne out by the pandemic.
Teenagers violently attacking each other and stealing cars at gunpoint might be a fluke or a fact of life. But it’s not wildly off-base to suggest that some of these events could be the natural consequence of the total obliteration of youth supports for two-plus years.
“Some pandemic effects will go back to normal when life returns to normal,” says Kessler. “The subway will be just as busy a year from now as it was three years ago.” But it’s naive to assume the kids will simply sort themselves out.