Think positive

The Star’s Royson James has taken the lead on analyzing Toronto’s recent spate of gun violence. While that’s not saying all that much, considering there are really only two full-time Toronto columnists at the major dailies (sorry, but I’m not counting Sue-Ann Levy’s daily updates on councillors’ spending habits), James has generally done a decent job of capturing local sentiment the past couple of weeks. But the thing is, that local sentiment has mostly been hysteria, which isn’t really worth capturing.

Yesterday’s column, while nothing if not eloquent in sounding the alarm bells, was a case in point. As James dismissed “the talk-radio solution” (“hire more cops, profile the Jamaicans, lock up the bad-ass gunmen who are almost always black, lobby for tougher sentencing, take back the streets, insist that parents rear better children”), among others, I kept waiting for him to take some sort of stab at a prescription. But since he didn’t, his main solution still seems to be that David Miller start doing more public grieving and posturing – a gesture that would play well to the rest of the city, but be completely useless in the affected areas.

Obviously, nobody has all the answers. But for a far more useful look at what might work, have a look at John Barber’s piece in Saturday’s Globe on the success of community policing efforts in Malvern. It’s behind a subscriber wall, sadly, but it’s worth tracking down.