Is 2018 going to be another ‘year of the gun’ in Toronto?  Let’s say it is, what are the solutions?

Councillor Mike Layton (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina) said he believes intervention programs would be more effective in curbing crime. He cites inequality and poverty among the root causes of crime.

“Rather than look at that, for generations, we’ve said let’s focus on the band-aid solution. That has ended up with a rather significant portion of the city’s budget going to policing,” Layton said.

“But we haven’t looked at investing, with the same rigour, into the programs to address part of the cause.”

Source: The Star

I completely agree with Mr. Layton here, if we truly want to deal with the cause of this type of violence (let’s face it, it’s not legal gun owners like me doing this stuff) we need to address the societal problems that lead people to a life of crime.  More policing is the band aid and not the answer, it only treats the symptoms but doesn’t address the root cause.

The are hard questions still remain, how as a society do we address poverty, the lack of opportunity, systemic racism that holds whole communities back, etc?  I don’t know but it looks like Mayor Tory is going with more bandaids…

At various media engagements throughout the week, Tory reiterated that the city is redoubling its efforts to deploy police where they’re needed.

“We are hiring more police officers as we speak. We are redeploying police officers so they’ll spend less time directing traffic and manning speed radar guns … so that police officers will have more time to be in the community and dealing with issues related to keeping the city safe,” he said at a Friday press conference.

Internal processes created to allow easier movement of front-line officers between divisions have made the police response more nimble.

Source: The Star

Every local administration focuses on more policing and it hasn’t worked, I guess we’re insane if we think it’ll work this time around…  I don’t have the answers but if I had to start somewhere, maybe offering decent city jobs to the poor would help, get them to clean up the streets and make Toronto beautiful, that’s a start.  I’d probably also start more youth focused groups that keeps them entertained so they have less time to waste.