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Information versus guns

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Two weeks into an unprecedented shooting incidents that has left 23 Torontonians dead or wounded, police have yet to identify publicly the culprits, other than to say the violence is "gang related."

Which gangs, exactly, are they talking about? Are the perpetrators immigrants, naturalized Canadians, "home-grown" gangsters or a combination of all three? Are there cultural, geographic or socio-economic commonalities among the shooters? Are they motivated by political causes, economic gain -- turf wars, say, over drugs, prostitution, extortion, car-jacking -- or by something as simple as personal grudges or perceived slights?

Police by now know the answer to some, if not all, of these questions, and they should stop being so coy about sharing the information with the worried public. Torontonians, and visitors to that city, have a right to know what they're up against, not only to protect their own safety by staying away from likely trouble spots, but to gauge an effective response.

So far, the police are advocating three measures to reduce the carnage: Clamping down on cross-border gun trafficking, hiring more officers to patrol Toronto's dicier neighbourhoods, and re-deploying existing officers to anti-gang squads.

All three measures will likely be implemented, and might yield results. But any long-term solution will have to target the roots of the problem, and that means getting a handle on who's doing the shooting, and why.

For that reason, the police should cast aside concerns over political correctness, racial profiling and the like, and simply tell us what they know about the gangsters and their victims, including any relevant details about their race or ethnic background and whether they believe we're dealing with the spectre of inter-ethnic or intra-ethnic violence that plagues some parts of the United States.

Once this is done, we can get to the serious business of discovering who's to blame, and what can be done.

Where, for example, is the community response? Are the police talking with the various civic and religious leaders of Toronto's ethnic communities, and are these leaders in turn pleading for an end to the violence? Are outreach programs there to ensure that Toronto's disaffected youth have sufficient moral guidance, role models, education and economic opportunity?

Without knowing more details about the attackers and their victims, it's difficult to know where to target community liaison resources.

Simply increasing the number of police on the beat is unlikely to have a significant impact on gun violence. When a shooting is witnessed by as many as 50 bystanders and no one identifies the assailants, you're dealing not, as the police say, with "a small few" thugs, but with community-wide fear, mistrust and alienation -- something an expanded police presence alone is unlikely to resolve.

What will work? Right now it's impossible to say. The answers will become clearer, however, when we know who's doing the shooting and why.