Multiple Victims of Shooting in Scarborough

[Roy G Biv]

Marko, you have not offered one semi-feasable solution in your ranting. Simply saying that people "should do this" or "have no excuse" etc doesn't help.

Unless you are blackmailed or forced into an action, there is always an element of personal responsibility. Now what? Is it fair to expect these kids to show more will power, dedication, work ethic and courage than most of us had to at that age? I was swimming down current when I was 13, not up it.

 

[Marko]

Marko, you have not offered one semi-feasable solution in your ranting. Simply saying that people "should do this" or "have no excuse" etc doesn't help.

Unless you are blackmailed or forced into an action, there is always an element of personal responsibility. Now what?

"What now" is you identify the neighborhoods or groups that need the extra attention and put it there where they welcome it or not. The police need to be more visible and engaged in the communities without being harassed for being in uniform or for profiling. Community and social outreach workers need to teach a measure of empowerment, not reinforce the mentality of dependency.

You force people who want assistance to learn to help themselves. Education and job training must be made priority, even mandatory in some places/cases. When people respect themselves, they respect others. Treating them like victims is demeaning and only works counter to the self respect they need to improve their lot in life. They'll pass thins onto their kids. This is not a quick fix but takes a long time.

There will always be *some* who resort to violent crime just because. When you are unable to help prevent all, those who do cross the line must be handled in a more serious fashion. House arrest means an electronic bracelet. Repeat offenses are not eligible for bail. Sentences are served in full and in some remote prison where they will hate being.

Some way, some how, an effort has to be made to expose the whole thug/pimp/gangsta culture to be the stupid cash grab that it is. People are getting rich promoting this crap and people who are not bright enough to see through it swallow it hook, line and sinker. It's one thing to act tough, or sing about satan or even how many women you sleep with every night - but it's entirely another to promote the shooting of police, killing of snitches, etc... This is the "street culture" that has changed in the last 20-30 years (as per the Fiorito column) and the one that will be toughest of all to combat - if at all. It can't happen locally as it's global right now, but education and enlightenment is the way for people to see through it.

I'll be called a racist or a dick for the things I've said, but someone needs to.

 

[Roots_Energize]

I lived and worked in the Caribbean for a year and never saw this kind of shit on the island I was on, but the very next island over it was widespread, simply because the culture existed to promote it - nothing more - and KingEast isn't going to affect change within that culture any more than I am. We're all outsiders, no matter how dirty we get our hands "in the trenches".

Its true that people have to have personal responsibility i agree. You also have to remember that Countries like Jamaica and Haiti have a much more violent political history with puppet governments, foreigners tampering around with the development of the country (America). The children grew up with multi-generational violence absorbed in there psyche. Compare this to countries with a less violent history like Barbados and Trinidad, you have less crime. If you check out Australia , the aboriginals over there make up a small percentage of the population yet they fill up the prisons. They also experienced an extreme violent condition. The idea is to unlearn violence inflicted psychologically or phsycially . It is up to these communities to begin a healing process which will take many generations to really recover.

 

[Roots_Energize]

So i think there is a reason why some communties have more dysfunction then others, as you say it changed from one country to the other, its not just because one group of people thought it was cool and made wrong decisions while the other thinks violence is not cool. Humans are generally the same and take a huge amount of proper nurturing and training to be functional . If you take one group of humans and give them no training and nurturing, expose them to violence , and kill there self worth, then you take another group of humans and give them lots of love, nurturing, training, give em the best health , resources, they see positive images of themselves everywhere, the 2 groups will go on very different paths and then down the road people will compare the 2 groups asking themselves why group x isn't taking responsibility like group y is.

 

[Marko]

If you take one group of humans and give them no training and nurturing, expose them to violence , and kill there self worth, then you take another group of humans and give them lots of love, nurturing, training, give em the best health , resources, they see positive images of themselves everywhere, the 2 groups will go on very different paths and then down the road people will compare the 2 groups asking themselves why group x isn't taking responsibility like group y is.

I brought this up in the other thread a few weeks ago. You don't have to look at one island vs another, or one country vs another - you can look right at the same community housing complexes and compare one set of families against another. We have to understand why people from the exact same communities within Toronto end up different. We know that the majority stay out of trouble and even if they don't elevate themselves from the situation they're in, most try to raise kids that go to school and have a chance to do more with their lives than they did. Once you understand what is working for those that succeed, that is what you need to try to replicate it for the others that are not succeeding.

Like I said, I think a large part of it is simply self respect, which can come from good parenting or role models or just an innate sense of "I can be better than this". You can't give it to people in the form of a cheque or basketball court. It's a complicated thing that is different for each community, but we can see clearly that certain communities seem to continue failing without the resorting to the guns and shooting.

If we can't help them to help themselves succeed, then the fallback is to try to prevent the killing from being the way the way the problems manifest themselves. I'm not suggesting for a second that a high suicide rate is OK or that stabbings are OK, but in both those cases there is a much lower chance of innocents being caught up in their outbursts. If people are intent on killing themselves or each other, there is nothing anyone can really do to prevent it - so let them do it with knives and brass knuckles.

I also suggest that we don't waste any time or resources on completely useless matters like long gun registries or bullet bans. The time and money wasted on those efforts is better spent on job training, security lighting, community police stations and increased screening at the border.

 

[Thanos]

^^^ im talking about today, in current times. Its interesting that there "was" a white problem but there is no longer one?

Yes there is but we refuse to accept because it makes us feel better to blame other races then our own.
The white mobsters and bikers in Montreal who burn down restos and shoot up bars are rarely mentioned on the news.

 

[canmark]

Mayor Ford's solution: make the bad guys leave town.

“It just tore my heart apart. And I just thought, this is not the city that we live in, this is — I was mad. More than upset, I was mad. I said, ‘Enough’s enough.’ I’m lookin’ around, and I said, ‘I’m not gonna sit here, I’m gonna be proactive.’ I talked to the premier, got a hold of the premier, called the prime minister’s office, I said, ‘I want meetings. I want something to be done.’ I want these people out of the city. And I’m not going to stop. Not put ’em in jail, then come back and you can live in the city. No. I want ’em out of the city. Go somewhere else. I don’t want ’em living in the city anymore,†Ford said.

He returned to the point later in the interview. “We have to send a message. Three years for possession of a handgun? That’s nonsense. You should do some serious hard time, and not come back here. Once you come out, out of jail, get out of the city. Go somewhere else,†he said.

* * *

“We must use every legal means to make life for these thugs miserable, to put them behnd bars, or to run them out of town,†he said in the statement.

 

[Roots_Energize]

^^ It still amazes me that someone this uneducated can be in a position of power like this. What does he think this is? the old wild west when the sheriff just chases the bad guys out of town, hahaha he needs to update to the twenty first century.

Yeah in toronto we dont want you , lets ship the gang members to kitchener/ waterloo? or port hope? im sure they would love to have them.

 

[ShonTron]

Mayor Ford's solution: make the bad guys leave town.

As I said in the Ford thread, he channels Coleman A. Young.

"I issue a warning to all those pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers: It’s time to leave Detroit; hit Eight Mile Road! And I don’t give a damn if they are black or white, or if they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road." - Coleman A. Young

 

[MisterF]

Yes, we can have community programs and neighborhood events and festivals, engage the neighborhood kids, give them a role model to follow but at the end of the day, you can't rely on these external factors alone in guiding your child. It's so easy to blame the system. It's a lot harder to take responsibility and blame oneself.

What exactly are you proposing? You say people should take personal responsiblity, and in a perfect world they would - everyone would be a good parent and every kid would want to contribute to society. But the world isn't perfect and human nature is more complicated than that. We can't just magically make everyone a good parent. Saying "it's up to ethnic group X" accomplishes nothing. We live in a society, and it's up to society as a whole to fix problems when personal responsibility has failed. It's the same reason we have public schools and roads, a military, and programs to help immigrants fit in - society has to provide services that individuals can't.

The community programs and engagement are exactly what works to help break the cycle of violence from generation to generation. They get people engaged, teach kids to take responsibility when their parents have failed, and give them something to look to other than gangs. And yes, certain neighbourhoods are targeted. This approach works and has helped reduce violent crime. And it's a lot cheaper than ignoring the problem and just lecturing people.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Its no wonder illegal guns are getting into Canada, the U.S. law enforcement is too busy going after Kinder Eggs. See this link.

 

[Eug]

For those keeping count: On the radio they described the newest shooting as being on a soccer pitch in Etobicoke. So there we go. Equal opportunity district labeling.

 

[adma]

Well, you gotta say this much: back when Jane Creba was shot, there was lots of talk about how it wouldn't have gotten such notice were it a black-on-black situation in Scarberia. Now, we've got one heck of a black-on-black situation in Scarberia, and it's the talk of the town--look, what are we supposed to do? Shove it under the carpet? Shove its location under a carpet?

And those of you who're hung up by the "dumping on Scarborough"--look, maybe underlying that so-called negative identity is the fact that Scarborough, still, a decade and a half post-amalgamation, has such a strong and positive self-identity. You know, a very active historical society, and all of that.

Something tells me that the hung-up-over-the-dumping-on-Scarborough bunch have, paradoxically, a very weak sense of Scarberian "identity", other than the usual rudimentary "the place they live", "the place they pay their taxes", etc. They probably wouldn't be able to identify the name "Doris McCarthy" without Googling...

 

[Admiral Beez]

Well, you gotta say this much: back when Jane Creba was shot, there was lots of talk about how it wouldn't have gotten such notice were it a black-on-black situation in Scarberia. Now, we've got one heck of a black-on-black situation in Scarberia, and it's the talk of the town--look, what are we supposed to do? Shove it under the carpet? Shove its location under a carpet?

Toronto does not have a violent black crime problem. What we have is a violent gang problem concentrated in a very thin demographic... that of young black men of Caribbean descent from troubled homes and broken families, living in or near public housing. That's it, that's the demographic we need to fix. It's not the general black population, it's not the young black kids, women or seniors, nor is it the black population who immigrated from Africa (with some exception for Somali gangs).

So, now we know the target demographic, just how big of a population can this be? Toronto only has about 2.5 million people, so there can't be more than ten or twenty thousand 17-25 year old black men of Caribbean descent from single-parent homes living in Toronto public housing or otherwise at the poverty line. Now have the demographic and social work experts drill down the numbers so more, and you'll end up with perhaps one to five thousand young men who are statistically more likely to join violent gangs. Now, the million dollar question is how to fix this group, and to prevent the next group of kids joining this group. I can't believe it's new b'ball courts.

 

[Filip]

For those keeping count: On the radio they described the newest shooting as being on a soccer pitch in Etobicoke. So there we go. Equal opportunity district labeling.

That was in York.. d'oh!