Anti-police sentiment increasing: Toronto chief

[Romulus]

from CTV.ca:

(disclosure: I know nothing about who owns this website)

Chief Julian Fantino said there has been a 70 per cent increase in shooting homicides so far this year over the same period last year, and there has been an alarming rise in violence against his own officers. Fantino said crime in his city had peaked as a result of young people who are "obviously out of control" and "accountable to no one."

He said in his experience, including eight years on the homicide squad, he has never seen so much violence.

"It wasn't like this at all, nor did we have this infusion of gangs and guns and the drugs to this degree," he said.

Toronto police have become targets in a large part because of racial profiling allegations made against the force in a series of articles published last year by the Toronto Star, Fantino said in the latest salvo directed at the newspaper.

*snip*

So far this year there have been 31 homicides, compared to 18 over the same period last year. According to Toronto police statistics, homicides have hovered annually for the past three years at about 60.

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Hmmm...

"Toronto police have become targets in a large part because of racial profiling allegations made against the force in a series of articles published last year by the Toronto Star, Fantino said in the latest salvo directed at the newspaper."

I read those articles and they were illuminating. But I also understood that the criminal justice system was trying to do something to correct the problems. What kind of political affiliation is CTV.ca?

[iverglas]

2. statistics ... and all that

CTV is the privately-owned commercial national network in Canada. CBC is the publicly-owned commercial network; there are publicly-owned non-profit networks in many provinces; and there are several other regional privately-owned commercial networks.

Apart from the formerly-Conrad Black owned publications (National Post, many local dailies ... he still owns the Jerusalem Post and London Telegraph), slant isn't a huge issue in the Canadian media, as compared to the US media.

CTV is owned by the same consortium as the Globe and Mail, after some recent mergers. That makes it "Conservative", note the capital "C", although this is of much more significance to the print media end of the operation. CTV itself doesn't have much of a slant in its TV news. Lloyd Robertson, who is the main national anchor, and I think still News Director, was for years the anchor at CBC. He's well respected for integrity, and when he left the CBC years ago I had a dilemma. It wasn't the news if it wasn't on the CBC, but it wasn't the news if Lloyd didn't read it ...

Julian Fantino, Toronto's chief of police, has a rather more chequered past. He was police chief in my old home town for a while, although long after I left: London, Ontario, one of the whitest and most middle-class cities in Canada; actually *the* whitest, I think, although maybe only second. That is quite amazing for a city of a quarter-million smack halfway between Toronto and Detroit. It was long the bastion of the Conservative Party. Julian got himself in some doo in London over an "investigation" into child pornography that was widely regarded as a witchhunt against gay men.

On the other hand, Toronto police have a long history of some pretty disreputable goings-on of their own. Years ago, there were disclosures of torture of suspects at good old 52 Division in downtown Toronto. Currently, you'd have a hard time distinguishing the police union officials from a bunch of thugs in a dark alley. They tried emulating the old RC church a couple of years ago, and exchanging little windshield stickers for donations to their association; everbody knew what the donations bought the person with the sticker.

A little background I hope may be useful.

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So far this year there have been 31 homicides, compared to 18 over the same period last year. According to Toronto police statistics, homicides have hovered annually for the past three years at about 60.

If homicides in the first seven months of the year have totalled 31, and they continued at the same rate, that would give us 53 for the year. Still below the average of 60 cited. And the problem still is that with such tiny numbers, it is virtually impossible to identify "trends". At the very least, they would have to be further broken down to see what changes there may have been in different types of homicides.

Now, Toronto is, if not the most multi-ethnic city in the world, one of the top three: "43 per cent of Toronto's population (1,051,125 people) reported themselves as being part of a visible minority, up from 37 per cent (882,330) in 1996 ... new immigrants to Toronto since 1991 number 516,635, representing 21 per cent of our population." (The reference is to the population of the City of Toronto proper, now an obsolete entity.)
http://www.toronto.ca/toronto_facts/diversity.htm

The Greater Toronto Area has a population of about 5 million.

Here are StatsCan's figures:
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/020925/d020925b.htm

2001
population: 4,881,392
number of homicides: 78
rate: 1.60

2000 population: 4,763,232
number of homicides: 81
rate: 1.70

average 1991-2000
rate: 1.84

Unfortunately, StatsCan has not yet released its homicides report for 2002. We do know that country-wide, "There were 582 homicides in 2002, 29 more than the previous year."
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/030724/d030724a.htm

In 2001, "Police reported 554 homicides in 2001, eight more than in 2000. Despite the small increase in numbers, the rate remained stable for the third consecutive year at 1.8 homicides for every 100,000 population. In general, the homicide rate has been declining since the mid-1970s. The rate of attempted murders fell 7% in 2001. All four Atlantic provinces and Quebec reported a decline in homicides; Ontario and all three prairie provinces recorded small increases."
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/020717/d020717b.htm

Once again -- we are talking about small numbers -- in 2002, an increase of 29 from 554 (I suspect that the "553" was subsequently revised to 554); in 2001, an increase of 8 from 546. In a country with a population of about 30 million. Idiosyncratic events can have huge effects on such small numbers; the number of women killed on Vancouver's downtown east side alone, in the space of a couple of years, completely distorts any trend that might otherwise exist, whether upward or downward.

Oh look; that's exactly what StatsCan says:
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/Canadiana/2003/07/24/144419-cp.html

Murder rate increase skewed: StatsCan

Canada's murder rate was driven up last year partly by the revelation that 15 women who disappeared from the Vancouver area over several years were murdered, Statistics Canada said Thursday.

The women's bodies were found over several months on a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C. The farmer, Robert Pickton is on trial for the murders.

(Altogether, 68 women went missing from that area; if they are all determined to be dead and to have been murdered, imagine what that will do to the homicide rates here. Still one murderer, though.)

Anyhow, here we are -- from a source some should like. I'll take these facts, which it reports, at face value, and offer it as a source for these facts only:
http://www.lufa.ca/news/news_item.asp?NewsID=1052

Toronto police investigated 60 homicides in 2002, the very same number as in 2001 and 2000. In the last 30 years, Toronto's population has grown by roughly 600,000 people; meanwhile, the homicide rate has stayed relatively constant, generally vacillating between 20 and 30 per 1 million residents.

<here, I think that the author may be confusing homicide stats for the Greater Toronto Area with population stats for the City of Toronto; as indicated earlier, the homicide rate for the GTA has never approached 20 per million residents.)

Because Toronto gun murders are relatively low, deadly sprees over short periods can appear to mark a shocking trend. Most of 2002's murders (48, or 75% of the total) came in the second half of the year ("Man dies in fourth week of gun violence," Toronto Star, Nov. 10, 2002). Should this pace continue well into 2003, we will have sustained evidence of a statistically significant rise in the murder rate. Police and the media have speculated that the rash of killings in the second half of 2002 signaled a flare-up in gang activity ("Revenge behind Murders," National Post, Dec. 31, 2002).

There we are. Small numbers, very easily affected by idiosyncratic events. The fast "pace" of late 2002 very obviously did *not* continue into 2003 at all, so we do *not* have evidence of a "statistically significant rise in the murder rate" -- just as the slow "pace" of early 2002 did not continue into late 2002. A whole lot more than any of that will be required to show either a sustained decrease or a sustained increase in the murder rate in Toronto ... or anywhere where the figures themselves are so small.

But hey, I won't disagree with Julian about violence in old T.O. Yes, it is not the Toronto the Good of old, but it sure as hell ain't Detroit, either. Detroit: regional population 2000 (I assume the homicide figures are for the regional population): 4,740,000; homicides 2002: 399. (Now, those are some figures that some more meaningful "trends" might be derived from, although I wouldn't suggest that any short-term trend be taken to mean too much even there.) Detroit's population was just about exactly the same as Toronto's, and it had nearly 7 times as many homicides. As long as Toronto's numbers are hovering around 60, plus or minus 5 or 10 or even 30 in a single year, I'm not seeing a big-time trend here.

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[The Backlash Cometh]

3. Excellent post.

Thank you.

[iverglas]

4. but long, eh? ;)

If only we could get past all the wild allegations about FACTS, reach some common ground on what the FACTS are and on what can and cannot be inferred from them -- even some minimal common ground on that last point -- we might be able to get on with discussing something.

Like, just for example:

Canada (and all other similar countries) has lower rates than the US for all crimes, homicides, and the use of firearms in crimes, homicides, suicides and accidental deaths and injuries.

Canada (and all other similar countries) has stricter legislation regarding access to (and the storage, handling and use of) firearms than the US.

Canada (and all other similar countires) has more equal income distribution than the US.

Canada (and all other similar countries) has a very different racial/ethnic population makeup from the US. (In fact, the US is more "homogeneous" in some ways than Canada and some other comparable countries; Canada, for example, has 16% foreign-born population compared the the US's ~10%).

Canada (and all other similar countries, I daresay) has a more "collectivist" social/political tradition than the US, and other important differences in social/political values and practices.

Canada, the US and all other similar countries have formal guarantees of very similar individual rights and freedoms in a constitution or a similar instrument; only the US has a specific guarantee regarding firearms (if we only knew what it meant ...).

Those are all facts. There are loads more, of course. And I offer facts derived from comparisons because such comparisons offer laboratories where it might be possible to see causes and effects, although it is entirely possible that all that could properly be asserted is correlation, or at best predictions.

Maybe we could just start by making a list of some facts that people think are relevant to the discussion of reducing the harm that results from access to firearms (which I have tried to phrase as neutrally as possible and as a goal that might be universally acceptable, and is certainly one that *I* think should be pursued -- and which does not rule out other goals).

Call me a cockeyed optimist.

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