January 1, 2003	Wednesday	Shawwal 27, 1423

TORONTO: It was once called “Toronto the Good” for its law-abiding ways, but that image has faded recently as Canada’s largest city battles a wave of gun violence centred on its Jamaican community and accusations that police use racial profiling.

Almost every weekend this autumn brought reports that another young man had been gunned down on the streets of Canada’s most affluent city, which has long considered itself a clean, safe and multi-ethnic community, unstained by the violence and decay that have plagued many similarly sized US cities.

Much of the violence has involved Toronto’s sizable population of Jamaican immigrants. In the most recent incident on Dec 9, a young man was shot and killed at the outdoor filming of a music video by a Jamaican reggae artist.

In the two months before then, 11 people were killed by gunfire, with several more injured, and the media scrutiny sharpened with every death.

At least nine of the victims were black and under the age of 30, focusing public attention on what police say is a growing trend of tit-for-tat gang violence in the city, much of which they say is centered in the heavily Jamaican neighbourhoods to the northwest of the city centre.

GANG WARS: “What we’ve seen, for the most part, are gangs fighting amongst each other, primarily for turf control and for the distribution of drugs,” said Norm Gardner, chairman of the Toronto Police services board.

“There seems to be a relationship between some of the gang activity in Toronto and Jamaica, where hit men are being imported to Jamaica from Toronto.”

While only about two per cent of Canada’s 30 million population is black, the number jumps to about 10 per cent in Toronto. Of those, about two-thirds are of Caribbean ethnicity, half of whom are Jamaican, according to government data.

Authorities in Jamaica recently warned that a turf war there could spill over onto the streets of Toronto, prompting Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino to say he will visit Jamaica in January to talk about common crime problems with security officials.

Community leaders say the core of the problem is poverty, as drug distributors prey on destitute teenagers, recruiting them from schools to sell drugs.

“It’s not a cultural problem. It’s a job problem. It’s a business problem. I believe that young men are entrapped into this lifestyle,” said Monica Willie, president of the Caribbean Association of Peel Region, a largely suburban area on Toronto’s western border.

Willie, who emigrated to Toronto from Jamaica about 35 years ago, says much of the violence results from vendettas over unpaid drug debts.

“Young men who are poor get called out to go settle a score with someone who didn’t pay up,” she said.

Nevertheless, Toronto remains very safe by US standards. According to government statistics, Toronto proper, with about 2.5 million people, had 59 homicides in 2001. Chicago proper, with 2.9 million people, had more than 600 murders last year.

Toronto’s mayor, Mel Lastman, calls it “the most culturally diverse city in the world” with people from 170 different countries speaking more than 100 different languages and dialects.

COMPARATIVELY SAFE: “It still is (a safe city), but it has problems like every other big city. When it comes to Toronto, compared to others, I think it’s wonderfully safe,” said Lincoln Alexander, chairman of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.

Alexander, who was Ontario’s first black lieutenant-governor and is also a former federal cabinet minister, was recently chosen to chair a conference on race relations, a meeting spurred by the fallout from a Sept 19 article in the Toronto Star.

The Star reported that although Jamaican-born residents make up 2.4 per cent of Toronto’s population, they account for 9.5 per cent of the total charges for violent offences. It also noted that blacks charged with simple drug possession were taken to a police station more often than whites accused of the same crime and held twice as often as whites.—Reuters