Action needed before Toronto has Tijuana's reputation
From The Toronto Sun
.
By Mike Strobel , Toronto Sun July 17, 2012
KAGAWONG, ONT "From out here, where you only get shot if you have antlers, Toronto is beginning to look like Tijuana.
Mexico's infamous border burgh was named Most Hated City in the World by CNN last month.
Ever been?
Lovely people, except for what local authorities quaintly call TCOs, Transnational Crime Organizations. AKA gangs. Sort of like Toronto's.
TCOs keep shooting at each other, as they do here, and sometimes lovely people get caught in the crossfire. Hence: Most Hated City in the World.
C'mon, Toronto is not in that league, you harrumph. TO is no TJ - even with two people shot dead and 23 wounded by gunfire in Monday night's barbecue
bloodbath in Scarborough.
Maybe not, but from up here, it looks closer than you think.
Tijuana, population 1.7 million, has a murder rate of seven per 100,000, while Toronto's has hovered around two per 100,000 the last few years.
Memphis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Washington, Tampa and many other American cities have worse murder rates than Tijuana. Baltimore's is 34 per 100,000.
But I can't imagine Baltimore as the Most Hated City in the World, unless you really, really disliked Cal Ripken.
Tijuana gets top billing because of the brazen brand of murders it has on offer. The in-your-face public kind. The kind for which Toronto is now
known.
Look, in fairness to TJ, the lovely people there are trying to fix it.
And in fairness to TO, it is still the Best City in the World, as Mel Lastman would say.
Your odds of getting shot in Toronto are still not much better than being bitten by a shark in the Humber River.
But in life, including tourism, image is often reality. Our bad press clippings are piling up fast.
If we aren't careful, pretty soon tourists will ask the same sort of questions about Toronto that they ask about Mogadishu. "Is it safe? I hear
there's gunfights?"
Other great cities go through this. Not long ago, you did not walk Times Square after midnight. New York City truly was the Gotham of Batman movies.
The citizenry finally got fed up, made Rudy Giuliani mayor and pretty soon gangsters couldn't fart without Rudy and police commissioner Bill Bratton
sniffing around.
The zero-tolerance worked, despite a few excesses and much mewling from the hand-wringing left.
Today, I would pitch a tent on Times Square and stay the night - if it weren't for the crackdown on street bums.
Is Rob Ford our Rudy Giuliani? Is Bill Blair our Bill Bratton? I hope so, because, face it, that's what we need right, never mind what the crime stats
say.
But it is also up to us, especially those nearest the mayhem.
Manitoulin can teach something about that. The past few weeks, grandmothers of Wikwemikong, the biggest Ojibwe reserve on the island, have been trying
to shoo drug dealers, including mainlanders who blood-suck local youth.
The grannies set up pickets, stand guard by sacred fires, vow to show up at bail hearings and generally get in dealers' faces.
"We'll be keeping an eye on them," lead granny Marian Peltier tells the Manitoulin Expositor. Already, the idea has spread south across Georgian Bay
to Beausoleil First Nation.
From The Toronto Sun
The grannies show much courage. That's usually what it takes. Leadership and street-level courage.
Every punk in Toronto with a chip on his shoulder and a gun in his hand also has a grandma, a mom, a dad, cousins, aunts, uncles, someone who knows
about it.
Sure, it's easy for me to say. My kid doesn't have a chip on his shoulder and a gun in his hand.
But if he did, I'd better know it, and I hope I'd grab him by the ear and do a little parenting. Turn him in, if need be, before he heads for a food
court, or a Canada Day party or a barbecue in Scarborough."
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.”
—Mark Twain
\"La vida es dura, el corazon es puro, y cantamos hasta la madrugada.” (Life is hard, the heart is pure and we sing until dawn.)
—Kirsty MacColl, Mambo de la Luna
\"Alea iacta est.\"
—Julius Caesar
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