Americas view | Crime in Canada
Bucking the trend
Canada as well as America confronts a gruesome mass shooting
By C.W. | OTTAWA
FOUR days before the massacre in a Colorado cinema attracted world attention, a gunfight erupted at a street party in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. A 14 year-old girl and a 23 year-old man were killed and 23 others were injured, making it the bloodiest mass shooting in the city's history. Only one person has been arrested, and was charged with reckless discharge of a firearm.
The deaths were the third public murder in Canada's biggest city in two months. On June 2nd a supper-time score-settling gunfight in a food court at the Eaton centre, a popular downtown shopping mall, killed two combatants and wounded five shoppers. Later that month a man was shot in what appeared to be a targeted killing, amidst a crowd watching the European football tournament in a downtown cafe.
These outbreaks of violence are all the more surprising given the generally encouraging trend in Canadian public safety. On July 24th the official statistics agency reported that total crime fell by 6% from 2010 to 2011, bringing the rate to its lowest since 1972. Everything from attempted murder and assaults to robberies, break-ins and car theft is on the decline. Canada's overall crime rate hasn't been this low since 1972.
Yet gun violence is creeping up, especially in big cities. There were 598 murders committed in Canada in 2011, up 17% from the year before. Incidents involving a firearm in Toronto rose by a third. The trend is even more pronounced in Ottawa, the country's normally sleepy capital. The city's police have already handled 27 cases of gunshots this year, compared with 23 during all of 2011.
According to Bill Blair, Toronto's police chief, the shooting was probably tied to the drug trade. He speculated that street gangs broken up by police a few years ago are now resuming their rivalries, as their members complete jail terms and they add young recruits. The attack claimed so many lives, he said, because such gangs now have access to have high-powered weapons that can quickly pump out a dozen or more rounds. Although handgun ownership is mostly prohibited in Canada, unlike in the United States, powerful firearms are still smuggled in regularly. On that score, more work could be done at the border: in 2011 the Canada Border Services Agency seized 473 illegal guns, not much more than the 452 seized in 2010.
The scale of the attack seems to have induced politicians to endorse some rather dubious remedies. Rob Ford, Toronto's mayor, said he wanted to ban anyone who had been jailed for a gun-related offence from living in the city. The national public-safety minister, Vic Toews, attributed the overall drop in crime in Canada to the Conservative government's mandatory-sentencing policies, suggesting that harsher penalties would prevent further tragedies like the Scarborough shooting.
However, the actual measures that have been announced so far seem a bit more sensible. The province of Ontario allocated an extra C$5m ($5m) for an anti-violence programme that encourages closer collaboration between police and civil-society organisations at the local level, and assigns more officers to dangerous areas in the summer. The city plans to increase the presence of police working overtime on its streets—particularly during the Caribbean carnival that starts on August 4th, which attracts hundreds of thousands to a parade and street parties throughout the city. This year spectators will be searched before entering the stands to watch the parade. An urban music festival beside the Eaton centre scheduled for the same weekend has also been cancelled.
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