PUBLICATION:
The Toronto Sun
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
Comment
PAGE:
C1
COLUMN:
Editorial
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TORONTO'S
THREE-PRONGED PROBLEM
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Today's
special Sunday Sun report on gangs and gun violence shines a light into
Toronto's largely unseen mean streets - where our police regularly risk their
lives, and where too many of our young people have lost theirs.
Thanks to dedicated cops who took Sun reporters and photographers along
for the ride on their bullet-riddled beats, the stories behind the recent
headlines - the string of violent weekends, the seemingly endless shootings, the
explosive controversy over alleged racial profiling by police and the crisis of
black-on-black crime - come into sharp focus.
These
are problems not confined to one part of the city, or one community. They are
insidious scourges that affect the city as a whole and cannot be left to fester,
or swept under the rug of a supposedly low overall crime rate.
The
problem, as Police Chief Julian Fantino has stated, is three-pronged: Gangs,
drugs and guns. Law-abiding citizens who think gangs are only a danger to one
another are dead wrong. Recent
shootings have caught numerous innocent bystanders, including children, in the
crossfire. Increasingly common gunfire has erupted in public places, clubs and
even on highways.
One
veteran 31 Division cop told the Sun's Jonathan Kingstone gun crimes are up
tenfold over five years ago. Now, says Const. Vyv Hardwick, "People are
shooting each other just for looking at them the wrong way, for stupid
reasons." And not all the
innocent victims have physical wounds - as Michele Mandel writes today, more
than a dozen children have lost their fathers forever to gun-toting killers.
The
solution to all this is also three-pronged: Cops, courts and community.
Criminal
gangs rule by fear - and they can no more be tolerated or appeased than
terrorists can. Sadly, Toronto is
paying the price for years of lax, liberal laws and attitudes toward crime.
Police
make scores of drug busts, only to see the dealers reappear within days. Our gun
laws, which theoretically allow severe prison terms for crimes involving
firearms, aren't enforced - firearms charges are routinely plea-bargained away
in court. With such little deterrence, guns proliferate.
As
today's stories show, our cops have redoubled efforts to get guns off the
streets, to break up gangs and to encourage the co-operation of the communities
gangsters and dealers prey on. Meantime,
our politicians, especially in Ottawa, persist in their view of Canada as a
safe, gun-free paradise (after all, don't we have that great firearms
registry?), turning a blind eye to cops' and citizens' need for tougher laws.