Targeting T.O.'s street gangs
Two recent stories in the Star, when juxtaposed, tell us much about the city's gang problems and the context in which they have emerged.
In one story, the Associated Press tells us the world's millionaires club is getting bigger and richer. In local news, the provincial government is providing Toronto Police Services with $5 million, the third time in three years, to continue its campaign against "gangs, guns and organized crime" and to boost the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy or TAVIS.
Toronto has its very own millionaires club coexisting alongside a growing number of residents living in poverty. The luxury condo boom is perversely matched by a boom in minimum wage jobs. From the Star's War on Poverty series to various research reports by the city's universities and community agencies, the increasing gap between Toronto's rich and poor has been amply documented. So has the gang violence plaguing Toronto's poorest neighbourhoods.
As University of Illinois criminologist John M. Hagedorn argues in his new book, A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture, contemporary street gangs in world cities such as our own have emerged within the context of increasing social and economic marginalization of young men. Since the mid-1970s, government policies have undermined the welfare state and rolled back trends toward social equality and economic redistribution, shifting wealth from the millions to the millionaires.
The well-paying manufacturing jobs that were once available to the less skilled have largely vanished, replaced by low-wage service sector work. Income supports, such as social assistance and employment insurance, have been slashed. Cutbacks have damaged our education system's capacity to address the needs of low-income students, resulting in the ejection of many young people from the school to the streets, long before graduation.
The result is an increasing number of socially excluded youth with few labour market prospects who confront racism and poverty in their everyday lives.
From São Paulo to Chicago, Cape Town to London, street gangs need this soil of poverty, hopelessness and social exclusion to grow and flourish. Compare a map of TAVIS gun and gang "hot spots" to the Toronto United Way's map of Poverty By Postal Code and you'll find a direct correlation between neighbourhoods with gang activity and neighbourhoods deemed "high priority" by the United Way's poverty reduction initiatives.
Toronto Police Services' various projects targeting street gangs have all occurred in neighbourhoods characterized by poverty, social exclusion and lacking in social services: Project Kryptic aimed to dismantle the Driftwood Crips in the Jane and Finch community; Project XXX targeted the Rexdale public housing-based gang the Jamestown Crew; Project Flicker sought out the Ardwick Bloods in Islington and Finch; Project Impact took place in the city's northeast neighbourhood of Malvern; and Project Pathfinder focused on the so-called Galloway Boys in the United Way's "priority neighbourhood" of Kingston-Galloway.
No matter how much money the Toronto police spend on enforcement, Toronto's street gangs are not going away any time soon. Gang leaders may be caught and locked up but as long as the socio-economic conditions in which gangs take root go unaddressed, incarcerated gang members will only be replaced by a new cadre of angry young men stuck in a socially and economically costly cycle of poverty, gang activity and prison.
Toronto could learn from the mistakes of another world city characterized by vast inequalities and gang activity – Los Angeles. In the wake of the Rodney King riots, local Bloods and Crips called a gang truce and put forward a joint proposal for rebuilding their communities. The Bloods/Crips Proposal for L.A.'s Facelift was an extensive plan for reform in areas ranging from law enforcement and education to human welfare and community economic development.
Unfortunately, it was ignored by the powers that be and Los Angeles missed an opportunity to incorporate its street gangs into a positive program of social uplift.
The L.A. proposal provides a historic example of the potential of street gangs for positive social change and political activism. Whether Toronto follows L.A. down the road of mass incarceration of young men from low-income communities or decides to address the roots of gang violence with serious economic redistribution and intensive social investments – not law and order strategies – is one of the most important questions facing our city today.
Yet recent events lead many to believe we're getting the answer to this question horribly wrong. As reported in the Star on May 22, police from 41 Division raided the home of tireless and respected youth worker Brian Henry.
For years, Henry has been on the front lines of his Malvern community's struggle for the hearts and minds of young gang members and potential recruits. Apparently working on a tip, 12 officers and a canine unit burst into Henry's house, handcuffing him and his wife face down on the floor.
Police didn't find what they were looking for and Henry was charged with possessing a small amount of marijuana, the remnant of a joint he admits to smoking; hardly the stuff of major police raids.
It is exactly this type of incident that feeds the oppositional consciousness of the streets and leads many youth in our city's most marginalized communities to see little future beyond the daily grind of poverty, racism and police harassment.
Toronto must do better if we seek to stem the tide of gang violence that troubles our city.
Simon Black is a researcher in the areas of urban labour markets and poverty at York University's City Institute and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council doctoral fellow in political science. He writes a politics column for the hip hop culture magazine POUND.
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