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Gunfire in Toronto

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Gun crime in Toronto is reaching alarming levels, as a sense of impunity takes root among teenage and young adult gangsters. This sense of impunity was made devastatingly clear last December, when a man opened fire on a packed city bus, striking an 11-year-old girl in the eye. The man has not been caught, and only a handful of witnesses have come forward.

Yet the city is still, to some extent, in denial. On Sunday, a man was shot while attending a memorial for two previous shooting victims.

The next day, there were six separate shootings; six people were wounded. The day after that, a man was shot dead while sitting in his SUV. The Toronto Star, in an editorial yesterday headlined "Gunsmoke masks an ever safer city," called the gunplay an anomaly, and cited crime statistics that show the Greater Toronto Area had the lowest crime rate last year of any major urban area in Canada. Duck under the bed, children, it's another anomaly.

Toronto is a remarkably safe city -- for those tucked into middle-class communities. But for those who are black, and poor, and live in or near public housing, it can be a violent place. The statistics make that clear. Rosemary Gartner, a University of Toronto criminologist, has produced data showing that blacks in Toronto are nearly five times as likely as non-blacks to be homicide victims. The rate among blacks is 10.1 per 100,000 people -- higher than the overall homicide rate in New York or Washington, and nearly on a par with Detroit.

Yet this appalling situation barely registers. It is out of sight and out of mind.

The most horrifying development of all in Canada's biggest city does not appear in any statistical table. Parents in several poor communities are now obliged to teach their children what to do when the bullets fly. Last year, bullets entered homes from shootouts in the street three times in three months in a single neighbourhood, Malvern. One man was killed while watching television with his son.

This is U.S.-style violence. After a dozen recent incidents with bullets zinging over and between large groups of children, the gunplay can not be dismissed as an anomaly.

Nothing illustrates the problem more than that daytime shooting of the 11-year-old girl -- a black girl -- on a city bus. It occurred in the densely populated Jane Street corridor. There were witnesses aplenty. The police, lacking a street presence, have neither the trust nor the contacts to crack open what should have been a simple case. Toronto has lost a basic certainty, a certainty common to all safe cities -- that those who commit violent acts in public will be brought to justice. The statisticians may not have noticed, but the gangsters certainly have.

What should be done? Toughen the fight against gun smuggling from the United States, enforce deportation orders against local gangsters who are non-citizens, improve social programs in poor areas and put more uniformed officers on the street. And make it an urgent priority to catch the young man who shot the11-year-old girl. Her shooting was no anomaly. It was just another fact of life in Toronto.