Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeWorldOpinion | Our leaders have a simple solution for TTC violence. Of...

Opinion | Our leaders have a simple solution for TTC violence. Of course it won’t work


The answer, it seems, is cops. John Tory’s immediate solution to the random violence gripping Toronto was 80 cops making overtime to patrol a transit system that carries almost two million people per day: Premier Doug Ford said the real solution is to hire more cops on a permanent basis. The police button is the easiest one for any politician to push, and you almost can’t blame them for it.

Except this isn’t just happening on the TTC, and thinking you can police your way out of a societal problem is just mashing the simple-solution button. Ask a doctor or a nurse, and you will hear estimates that violence in emergency departments is maybe two and three times higher than it was before the pandemic, when it was already far worse than it was, say, 10 years ago. I was on a parents’ council call the other day that included school board reps, and there were concerns expressed about rising violence in schools: more cameras were brought up as a potential solution. Naturally, some parents also mentioned their kids didn’t want to take the bus.

We don’t have a true sense of how widespread this is; we just have a list of random attacks, and a feeling that something is clearly wrong. So Tory pressed about the only instant button available: Cops, who tweeted an old picture of an officer on a horse outside a subway station as part of the push. Top-notch stuff, presuming no criminal is smart enough to flee down a flight of stairs.

It’s both understandable and laughable. Are you going to put a police officer on every bus? Every subway car and streetcar? The best you can hope for is a deterrence of what might be copycat attacks — the teens with a BB gun at York University station seem like a good example. Even that is thin, and the possibility of a bad confrontation between and officer and someone in distress seems high.

And so we’re caught in the space between the place where reasonable people acknowledge this is a bigger, complex, partly known problem, and their instinct is to throw police at it. What you can say for sure is there is a mental health problem and a homelessness problem, and they may overlap.

Random attacks aren’t just happening in Toronto. They were a major issue in the recent Vancouver municipal election, and the city produced a report last September: Stranger attacks were found to have risen by 35 per cent in 2020 and 2021 versus 2019, and there were elements of anti-Asian racism, increased drug toxicity, and most often, mental illness.

It happened in New York, where violent crime spiked on the subway by 30 per cent despite increased police presence; the city claimed a drop at year’s end showed the plan was working. In May last year sleepy Victoria, B.C., dealt with gangs of roving teens attacking people. We’ve seen that here.

It’s easy to theorize that the pandemic accelerated all kinds of bad trends, from inequality to mental health to isolation and the dopamine hole of social media. Society-level trauma, in the midst of all the other generational, societal, and political pressures, will have effects.

But we may be conflating elements of crisis and decline. Are Toronto’s attacks linked to homelessness? Not necessarily. But we know Toronto closed three of its 23 shelter hotels late in 2022, and plans to close five more in 2023; the pandemic increase in funding that accounts for 30 per cent of shelter beds has dried up. We know there are links between being unhoused and mental illness. We know this has been a city run on austerity for a decade, and the cracks are showing everywhere. This is decline. The TTC is just our biggest shared space to see it.

“This is the part that has been hard for all of us on the front line in this work, because of course this was going to happen,” says Dr. Andrew Boozary, a longtime advocate for the homeless, and the clinical lead on University Health Network’s new clinic for homeless people who are intoxicated enough to require paramedics or police.

“And of course this is going to be worse than ever, when we were only trying to address homelessness from a place of you know, vector control versus the human dignity and health economics that are in place.”

But homelessness doesn’t necessarily line up with the violent attacks of late, and there must be something bigger at play. Dr. Cameron Anderson is a psychiatrist who has extensive experience with the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, and an old friend. I asked him what the random-attack surge there meant.

“Random violence doesn’t reflect mental illness, but the failure of society to care for and support the mental health of its citizens,” said Anderson. “There’s a distinction. People with psychiatric disorders are less likely to commit violent crimes than the general population, and are more likely to actually be victims.

“It gives us comfort to say, only a crazy person would do such a thing. But systematic isolation and marginalization drive massive distress. It would be safer and less threatening to see perpetrators of random violence as psychos, crazies, aliens. But they’re a reflection of ourselves, our society, and our failure.”

Sounds familiar, and still complex: we’re living in a society where problems were complex before the pandemic made hospitals and airports and budgets and transit worse, before the Boomers all got old and housing went nuts and climate change complicated everything. After the pandemic, so many things are just worse.

And what we get is simple solutions to complex problems, reflexive attempts to stuff the unpleasant stuff somewhere we don’t see it, and a tacit acceptance that we lack both the state capacity and political will to take care of complicated issues at scale and do the hard work, because that’s the direction in which Canada has coasted for the last 50 years.

Instead we get cops, and maybe some horses, to hold back tides of unknown depth that we don’t fully understand. Welcome to life in decline.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Conversations are opinions of our readers and are subject to the Code of Conduct. The Star does not endorse these opinions.





Source link

RELATED ARTICLES

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

- Advertisment -

Most Popular

Recent Comments