How can Toronto enter the next decade a safer city? To fight crime, we must first fight poverty

The first year of the new decade has not been a promising one for gunplay in Toronto.

At some 409 incidents as of last Wednesday, the city had already surpassed last year’s shooting total by 39 — despite being in lockdown for months due to .

So as we look ahead to , how can we ensure this fresh, 10-year span won’t be remembered as the Decade of the Gun?

Maybe look to Einstein for help.

“He said, ‘the consciousness that created the problem cannot be expected to solve it,’ ” says crime expert and York University sociologist Livy Visano, paraphrasing the theoretical physicist. “That means the problem can’t be solved by the existing solutions.”

Those existing solutions are rooted in social and economic systems where wealth and power are cemented in unequal proportions — and indeed where the perceptions of crime itself are cast unfairly on the downtrodden, he says.

New solutions to tamp down crime in the city, many experts say, should focus on alleviating poverty — through new housing plans, equitable wealth distribution, better policing practices and even by striking some common, poverty-boosting crimes from the books.

But the link between impoverishment and crime is more complex than many imagine, Visano says.

“With crime and socioeconomic status there’s been a long historical relationship since the inception of criminology (in the 18th century),” he says.

“But the question that the more progressive criminologists would (ask) is, how strong is that correlation?”

Certainly, Visano says, gun and gang crimes are largely products of poverty — where the acquisition of goods, respect, education and power is limited by economic status.

“But we have a tendency to look at this (poverty-crime) relationship and not question what crime is,” he says.

Visano says there are three broad categories of crime — crimes of pathology (or mental illness) crimes of passion and those of profit.

And people of every economic class participate in all three types with equal proclivity.

“Crimes of pathology (such as) serial killers straddle all classes, crimes of passion staddle all classes,” Visano says.

“But crimes of profit — this also involves all classes — but the manifestations seem to be quite different.”

On white-collar Bay Street, crimes of profit would likely involve embezzlement or insider trading, he says. Keystroke crimes.

“But for the more disadvantaged communities we see more visible forms, more obvious forms … in the more public and visible space,” Visano says.

And that visibility — the guns, the gangs, the violence of the street — creates a general perception that crime is largely a province of the poor.

That doesn’t mean that street crime is not a serious problem, Visano says. (With a little more than two months left in the year, some 200 people have already been killed or injured by gunfire in Toronto.)

There’s also an obvious solution — a redistribution of wealth that creates more equal opportunities for social status and material comfort across society.

But such a redistribution is almost surely a pipe dream, Visano says.

“It’s not just the redistribution of wealth because that is just not in the mindsets (of people in power) given that we live in a capitalist society,” he says. “Are we prepared to eradicate poverty? Absolutely not. That will never happen.”

Instead, Visano says, crime solutions lie in a number of other areas.

Ryerson University criminologist Emily van der Meulen says one of these is to decriminalize common offences like prostitution and simple drug possession — crimes which themselves exacerbate poverty.

“Canada has a long history of criminalizing poverty,” van der Meulen said in an online interview.

“This is demonstrated particularly clearly by the ways in which police services target low-income and racialized people when enforcing certain laws, for example laws related to sex work and drug use,” she says.

Striking down current prostitution and drug laws, van der Meulen says, would also lower poverty rates significantly.

“To alleviate poverty, we need to consider how policing, laws, sentencing and the criminal justice system as a whole target and discriminate against low income people, in turn keeping them in precarious situations,” she says.

“To begin to address poverty, these activities need to be removed from the Criminal Code.”

A criminal record can be a barrier to accessing housing and employment, both vital to financial success, van der Muelen says. She says past records for such offences should be expunged.

At the city level, police could be encouraged to look the other way, even if the offences remained on the books, van der Muelen says.

“The police can adopt a policy of nonenforcement. This approach has been effective in other jurisdictions,” she says.

“Deciding to not enforce specific Criminal Code provisions can help rectify the highly problematic and disproportionate impacts that unjust laws — like those related to sex work and simple drug possession — have on marginalized and low income communities.”

Also locally, the provision of affordable and attractive housing for low-income and marginalized people would go a long way toward alleviating poverty and crime, says Anne Babcock, president and CEO of Toronto’s WoodGreen Community Services.

“Many populations are disproportionately engaged with the justice system because of their background, their race, their age and their socio-economic (situations),” says Babcock, whose agency is one of the city’s largest affordable housing providers. “Reducing poverty by offering housing-first programs is one way to intervene in the life of vulnerable groups in a way that brings stability and creates the space to then build new skills, strengthen connections with the community and improve physical and mental well-being.”

Babcock points to one particular group — youth who have aged-out of foster care programs — as a prime example of the link between housing, poverty and crime.

She says almost 60 per cent of these tossed-about kids are homeless within six months of leaving the system, while some 75 per cent of them are victims of crime within a year.

An American study showed that 42 per cent of young men who’d transitioned out of foster care had been arrested, while 23 per cent had been convicted of crimes, says Babcock, whose agency’s Free2Be program helps provide housing support and a range of other programs to such kids.

“While we don’t necessarily focus on crime, we do know that this is a particular group that is more likely to be … involved in the criminal justice system,” Babcock says.

“We (also) know that this moment in their life is important. By securing housing, we are able to support the youth with programming opportunities that set them on a more successful path,” she says.

Babcock says almost 75 per cent of the youth going through the agency’s post-foster-care program secured stable housing, and 94 per cent were in school or working.

Visano contends, however, that the most important tools for reducing violence and street crime may rest within disadvantaged communities themselves, where the vast majority of people have knowledge of street and gang life, but shun it.

“A question that is seldom asked is, ‘We have a lot of violence, but why wouldn’t we have more, what does this say about the communities?’ ” Visano says. “The majority of people in those communities don’t resort to violence.”

Yet when searching for solutions, politicians and committee leaders most often huddle within their own power structures — comfort zones that avoid the participation of others, or seek it in token portions.

“They’re cemented to privilege in many ways that prevent them from going beyond the hierarchies of power,” Visano says.

He says the views of people in underprivileged communities are often unsought, or rejected when they are.

As well, Visano says, politicians often turn to a list of usual suspects when seeking community involvement — people with a public profile but limited knowledge of the communities they are meant to represent.

“There’s a tendency to cherry pick members of the community to participate on some of these committees or counsels,” he says. “We don’t have the whole spectrum of community input.”

Visano also promotes something progressive members in his field describe as peacekeeping criminology.

“It’s trying to build within the community (to) collaborate and corroborate within the community,” he says.

And for this, Visano says, police reform is also a key — in particular, reform that would have police respect the privacy of underprivileged Malvern residents as much as those of wealthy Rosedale.

“It matters very little to the police when they go into certain highrise structures in disadvantaged communities and patrol the hallways, the stairwells looking for suspects,” he says.

“The … logistics of policing certainly targets the disadvantaged communities on a routine, regular basis.”

This targeting creates tensions that only heighten crime levels and amplify them by the sheer volume of surveillance.

“Compare Forest Hill, The Kingsway, the Bridle Path with Rexdale, Malvern, Regent Park,” Visano says, referring to some of the city’s wealthier and more disadvantaged neighbourhoods in turn. “The types of policing in terms of the vehicles that are used by the police and the aggressive style of profiling, (they’re) very, very different.”

And this style of aggressive policing pushed especially hard in 2005 — the so-called Year of the Gun in Toronto — has little lasting benefit.

“They had this program where they would enforce and aggressively pick up a lot of the street gangs,” Visano says. “But there was no direct commitment to looking at their own values, their own processes, to examine where this violence comes from.”

That program — the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy or TAVIS — did little to bring crime down long term, Visano says.

“It cleaned up the problem for a couple of months, but the underlying roots, the basis, the foundations of all this have never been talked about,” he says.

As well, Visano says, most of the information and data available to study gun and gang violence comes from the police — with all the institutional baggage and bias that entails.

“Why don’t we engage in the language of those who are involved?” he says.

“Why not do more self report studies, why not do more observational studies and understand what it is that compel these youth to get into these gangs and to don the mantle of violence?”

A watchful media, attuned to injustices in underprivileged communities, is also a key to crime reduction, as is the mass vigilance and peaceful resistance within the communities themselves, Visano says.

“We’re seeing it in the Black Lives Matter happening throughout North America that the media coverage and the participation of the community I think will stimulate solutions,” he says. “We’re not leaving it to politicians … we’re having the movement directed by spokespeople from the community and articulated by the media.”

But Yafet Tewelde, a Toronto community activist and PhD candidate at York, says the redistribution of wealth in this economic powerhouse of a city is essential in tamping down crime.

“When we talk about fighting crime, reducing crime, the response is traditionally of course police, prisons, courts,” says Tewelde, whose thesis centres on the relationship between multiculturalism and policing in Canada.

But Tewelde says reports dating back decades show that increases in these traditional, law-and-order responses only amplify crime, and that what’s really needed is the alleviation of poverty.

“The problem is that people think of these as two separated things; you fight poverty on one side and you fight crime on the other,” he says. “But poverty-fighting is crime-fighting. These things are intrinsically linked and you have to direct resources into that.”

As such, the job lies largely outside the city’s economic orbit and capacity, Tewelde says.

“We’re actually talking about a massive redistribution of wealth, it’s not a city issue,” he says.

He says that only the provincial and federal governments have the regulatory and financial powers to create large-scale poverty-fighting programs.

“When we talk about poverty reduction, it’s such a simple answer that requires a big cultural shift,” Tewelde says. “It’s a massive redistribution of wealth.”

Tewelde says the current COVID-19 crisis has created a new appreciation of lower-paid workers — who comprise a good percentage of the essential workforce that has kept the stricken city running.

And this could translate, he says, into a willingness to push wealth downwards across society.

“But the reality is there’s always been these opportunities … there’s been lots of crises,” he says.

“I’ve learned not to put too much stock into people’s response to a crisis.”

The city, however, isn’t bereft of crime reduction capabilities, Tewelde says.

For example, he says, it can initiate programs to bring down high school dropout rates and implement police reforms that add more social workers to its crime-control array.

“If we’re just focusing on policing for example, how do we redirect more resources into people who are first responders that aren’t people with guns?”

Joseph Hall is a Toronto-based contributor for the Star. A former Star reporter and feature writer, he is based in Toronto.