OPP boss decries gun violence against innocents
By MICHELE MANDEL, SUN MEDIA
Last Updated: 2nd November 2008, 2:34am
As we bade goodbye yesterday to yet another innocent victim of random gun violence, this bullet-riddled city has finally declared enough is enough.
No more young girls to gasp their last breaths on our sidewalks of pooling crimson blood; no more pub goers gunned down on their way home to their young sons; no more grocers felled as they stock their stands with oranges on a sunny day.
No more.
OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino sounded the sirens no one heeded during his long tenure as Toronto Police chief. Now he believes we are finally listening.
"We've gone from a time where bad guys were shooting bad guys," Fantino says, "to what we're seeing now: Innocent people caught up in this OK Corral mentality where you can have a gunfight on the busiest street in North America and there is a callous disregard for the consequences."
Yet he is actually more optimistic about the future than he's ever been.
"The more people understand their own vulnerability, the more inclined they are to say, 'Enough is enough. We're not going to sit back and take it anymore. We're not going to be tolerant of these people, we're not going to have charity for gunmen anymore.' "
Surely that time has come.
We feel unsafe in our own city. For a while, there was a false sense of security -- if you didn't live at Jane and Finch or Galloway or in one of this city's other disastrous, crime-infested housing projects, if you didn't belong to a gang or deal in drugs, it was easier to believe that gun violence wouldn't shatter your world.
Not so anymore.
"We know much of the violence in our city takes place among people who are engaged in activities that make it far more likely they'll be victims of violent crime," Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair still insists.
"But unfortunately there have also been a number of cases in Toronto -- and those cases are always shocking to the entire community -- when people who are totally innocent, going about their daily lives, not engaged in any behaviour which would make it more likely that they would be victimized, and because they are in what is often called 'the wrong place at the wrong time,' they are victims.
"Everyone has a right to go shopping on Yonge St., to go out to the local pub and have an evening out with friends. When criminals decide to bring violence to those places, they put everybody at risk and it's a huge concern."
So Statistics Canada may insist that the homicide rate is down, again, and that crime is on the decrease, but it doesn't feel that way. It certainly doesn't read that way, not with the daily headlines filled with news of yet another shooting.
Like most criminologists, Scot Wortley is quick to insist that the numbers do show that we are not in any real danger from street violence. But interestingly, the University of Toronto professor has identified a number of disturbing trends in those stats which even he agrees are legitimate causes for concern.
Wortley says the evidence suggests that homicides are more likely to involve handguns and more likely to occur in public places than they would have 50 years ago. "That's why," he notes, "bystanders are being hit."
In fact, Stats Canada confirms that in 2007, handguns were used in about two-thirds of all Canadian homicides, up from about 25% in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In urban centres, like Toronto, 81% of all firearm-related homicides were committed with a handgun.
The typical murder victim has also become much younger, the criminologist says. "If you are over 30 and living in this city, your chances of dying a violent death are lower than they have ever been," Wortley notes.
"But if you are young and living in one of the disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Toronto," he warns, "there may have been a significant increase in the chances of your dying a violent death. Although our homicide rate hasn't changed that much over 30 years, and if anything it's declined, it has increased among certain populations."
So pity the thousands of young innocents trapped in Toronto's hell hole public housing neighbourhoods of crime -- the Ephraim Browns of this city, 11-year-olds who are gunned down while sitting on a fence at their cousin's birthday. Or the dozens more who narrowly miss death, like 12-year-old Matthew Page who last year had a bullet zoom by his head while playing toy cars inside his Driftwood Ct. bedroom.
Suddenly, Toronto has become a shooting gallery. Last weekend, we even had a gun-wielding 15-year-old boy used as a hitman to settle a score between feuding boyfriends at a 4-year-old's birthday party.
There are children with guns in our city, like child soldiers in some godforsaken Third World warrior state .
Last year, Toronto Police seized 2,603 firearms -- with 817 linked to crimes or had their serial numbers removed. The great big arsenal that is the United States is the source of an estimated 30,000 firearms spirited into Canada across the 49th parallel every year. The chief estimates that 70% of the crime guns being used in Toronto have been smuggled in from across the border.
The rest, he says, are legal, registered handguns that have been stolen from their owners. According to the Registrar of Firearms, there are almost 194,000 registered handguns in the province with more than 1,000 stolen and unaccounted for at the end of 2007.
So Blair is supporting the controversial call by both Mayor David Miller and Premier Dalton McGuinty for Ottawa to ban handguns. While he acknowledges it would infringe on the rights of responsible gun owners, the chief argues it's a sacrifice necessary for the greater good.
But at least one victims' advocate -- and retired police officer -- calls the proposed ban "idiotic PR."
"It provides false hope," argues John Muise, head of public safety at the Canadian Centre for Abuse Awareness. "Those (stolen legal) guns would just be replaced by bringing more guns across the border. We have 5,000 km of border with the United States."
And it is as porous as cheesecloth.
The Canada Border Services Agency seized just 662 guns at crossing points last year, three-quarters of them handguns. How many more thousands slip through, selling for $1,500 to $3,000 each on Toronto streets?
Instead of a handgun ban, Muise believes the new higher mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes passed into law by the Stephen Harper government in May will do more to stem Toronto's Wild West gunplay.
The Criminal Code already provided a maximum sentence of 14 years for anyone using a firearm in the commission of an offence, in addition to any other sentence, but it was routinely plea bargained away. The new legislation increases the minimum sentence that must be imposed in a handful of gun-related crimes, including possession of a loaded firearm, from one year to three for a first offence, and from one year to five for a second.
Whether mandatory minimum sentences are actually a deterrent is a debate Toronto's police chief will leave to those in academia. What Blair does know for certain is that the new sentences should ensure that bad guys are off our streets for a while longer. "At the very least, while they're serving their sentence, everyone else is protected from them.
"We're arresting people with loaded handguns almost every day in the city of Toronto and we want to ensure the sentences they receive for those crimes are significantly serious enough to make a difference."
As well, Blair applauds the new federal reverse onus provisions for bail so that those accused of serious gun crimes will have to show why they shouldn't be kept in jail while awaiting trial.
"What we are finding is that for really violent, dangerous people, conditions like house arrest, curfews, non-associations, boundaries on where they can go -- they're not paying any attention to those things."
He is tired of the revolving door of criminals who are repeatedly picked up for violating the court's stipulations. "I don't think they should get several kicks at that can. If they're not going to obey their conditions and they're released and continue to put others at risk, then the courts have no choice, I believe, than to put them in secure custody."
But there have been tough laws on the books in the past. The question is whether Crowns and judges will actually follow them.
With current court backlogs, the system has become a "sausage factory," charges Muise, the victims' advocate who lobbied for the new mandatory minimums in Ottawa.
"They are under enormous pressure to grind these cases out, to accept pleas, to reduce the number of cases on the docket," he says with much sympathy for the overworked officers of the Crown. "At the end of the day, you need to see the administration of justice as a priority and it's not in this province."
It's a charge that was echoed all this week at Queen's Park by angry Opposition Leader Bob Runciman, who represents Bailey Zaveda's hometown.
"He maintains public safety is number one but that's actually not the case," he charges of Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley, who finally announced a crimefighter's summit after days of pressure. "It's about getting efficiencies in the system and saving money. They're dropping the ball way too often."
So we see cases such as that of Kyle Weese, arrested in Zaveda's murder, who had his seven gun charges in 2006 reduced to one. Or the man charged in the Oct. 13 murders of a Scarborough mother and daughter who was free on bail at the time for two violent sex assaults. Or the 15-year-old birthday party shooter who already had four breaches of his probation.
And then there are all those criminals who are getting at least a 2-for-1 -- and sometimes 3-for-1 gift which reduces their sentence because of the time they've served in pre-custody -- a despicable practise the McGuinty government is lobbying Ottawa to change.
Weese is a glaring reason why. "He had almost a two-year break on his sentence," Runciman says with frustration. "He would still have been incarcerated right now."
Instead, he stands charged anew, this time with murdering a girl just having a smoke outside her neighbourhood bar.
"No more discounts," insists the OPP commissioner.
"I have no charitable bone in me when it comes to these people," Fantino says. "Unfortunately, our criminal justice system does. They get bargain basement justice."
But they shouldn't anymore. Because enough is enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment