[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto is fantastically safe. So why do we keep obsessing over gun violence?"

[rfmcdonald]

Jonathan Kay's point in the National Post about gun crime in Toronto being rare (by world, North American, even Canadian standards) and concentrated in just a few discrete categories, and certainly not worth mass-media-driven panic, is a good one. (The counterpoint that could be made, that gun crime could be lower still, is a good point, but has to be made in the context of reality.)

I’m also appalled by the level of public fear sown by a few scattered instances of violence. Toronto is a city of over 2.6-million people, yet witnessed just 45 murders in 2011 — a per-capita murder rate of just over 0.0017% — about a tenth of that of Philadelphia and Chicago, America’s per-capita murder capitals. Among the American cities that witnessed more murders than Toronto in 2011 were Nashville (pop. 616,000), Tulsa, Okla (pop. 393,000), and Stockton, Cal. (292,000). In per-capita terms, Toronto has a substantially smaller homicide problem than various other Canadian cities — most notably, Winnipeg and Edmonton.

The media barrage that followed last month’s Eaton Centre and Little Italy shootings was so intense that some of my otherwise intelligent friends told me they were afraid to go downtown, lest they be gunned down in the “WAR ZONE” that apparently is enveloping the city. But as they cower in their basement bunkers, these homebodies might want to check out the eye-opening homicide database maintained by CBC News, listing every GTA killing going back to 2009, complete with geographical markers and links to associated news stories.

Out of interest, I used this database to go through each of the 25 listed 2012 homicides, killing by killing. I’ve done the same thing in previous years, and I always find the exercise oddly reassuring; the act of studying the lists serves to completely debunk the idea that ordinary, innocent Torontonians are at substantial risk of murder.

Aside from a few ambiguous cases each year, the killings generally fall into three groups: (1) domestic violence involving lovers, ex-lovers or parents (accounting for, by my count, a total of four homicides in 2012), (2) settling of accounts among known criminals and (3) violent disputes that erupt suddenly between acquaintances; often late at night; in environments well-saturated with other criminal elements; and fueled by alcohol, drugs or mental illness.

The second category is the biggest. The most recent GTA homicide victim (#25), for instance, a Somali-Canadian man named Hussein Hussein, was apparently a well-known player in the Alberta-Toronto drug trade. Homicide victim #23, killed in Little Italy in an apparent targeted shooting, was “known to police” and “set to stand trial over accusations he beat up a man following a card game at a suburban club.”

Every murder is tragic. But the reporting of these tragedies should not distract us from the fact that non-criminal Torontonians — far from living in a “WAR ZONE” — inhabit one of the safest urban environments in the world.