Toronto's Answer To Problem....

...build basketball courts rather than prisons. Make racial profiling a no no for police. Police make arrests and courts drag their feet, bail almost automatic, concurrent sentencing, allowance for time served, etc etc.
 

A city under siege

Toronto held hostage by threats from gangbangers

By MICHELE MANDEL, Toronto Sun

So this is what we’ve become: A city under siege, a city held hostage by gangbangers.
How else to describe the shocking events of these past few days, the stunning mistrial in the Jordan Manners murder case after frightened prosecution witnesses suddenly recanted their stories on the stand, intimidating gang members appeared strutting around the courthouse and the police had to call in the ETF to defend a hall of justice from rumours of a Crips’ plan to smuggle in a gun.
Not surprisingly, the deadlocked jury couldn’t reach a verdict in Jordan’s killing. And now the two young men charged with shooting the 15-year-old student in the stairwell at C.W. Jefferys high school will likely apply for bail while the Crown decides whether to retry their doomed case.
So what message does this send out to all those who would take up guns?
To the relatives of other victims still anxiously awaiting justice, the message is alarmingly clear: “It’s okay to kill, it’s okay to have a gun,” says a dismayed Clemee Joseph, 39. “They think they’re untouchable now.”
And how they must be laughing.
“I’m so angry and I know how Jordan’s mother is feeling right now,” says Joseph, a nanny who brought her two boys here from St. Lucia five years ago to find a better future. “When and if they find my son’s killer, I don’t want a mistrial, I want a conviction.”
Last May, Joseph lost her 18-year-old son Jarvis St. Remy, yet another young black teen shot down in the prime of his life.
Her oldest child was a quiet Grade 12 Weston Tech high school student who wanted to be a computer engineer.
That Friday night, he was just standing at a bus stop on Dundas St. anxious to make his curfew after spending the evening watching TV with his two best friends.
He would never make it home.
His mother sits in her pretty Etobicoke apartment, a portrait of her handsome son on the coffee table before her. “I got married two years ago and both my sons walked me down the aisle,” she explains with a smile that is both proud and sad.
Now her younger child struggles with life without his big brother, while she comes home from work every day still half expecting to find Jarvis sitting as usual at the computer by the front door.
Her pain slices deeper than any parent wishes to imagine.
What makes it even more unbearable is knowing his brazen killers remain out there with impunity. “Somebody knows something,” Joseph insists.
But fear reigns, intimidation rules.
She remembers that day three years ago when she heard a boy had been shot at C.W. Jefferys. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, that poor mother, what she must be feeling.’ Never would I have imagined that I would be in the same situation two years later.”
Now she aches along with Jordan’s mother to see our justice system kidnapped by the same kind of thugs who killed their children. She believes fear emboldens these gangsters and the fact that two witnesses in the Manners’ case were successfully silenced will only encourage them even more.
“Probably somebody threatened them,” Joseph believes. “More money has to be put into protection. People out there know what’s going on but they are afraid to talk because there’s no protection for them.”
The judge has asked that the two Manners’ witnesses be investigated. Yet surprisingly, even as the mother of a murdered child, Joseph sympathizes with the young women whose fear of reprisal may have scuttled the trial. “I don’t blame them. There’s nothing in place to protect them. If I’m afraid for my life, I would change my story, too.”
Just 10 days after her son was killed, 14-year-old Adrian Johnston was gunned down four blocks away in a field near Scarlett Rd.
His murder also remains unsolved, his relatives are just as certain that someone knows who pulled the trigger.
“Adrian’s friends won’t come forward because they’re afraid for their lives,” explains Lana Tisi, Adrian’s aunt.
And that’s what these gun-toting criminals are counting on.
Tisi was encouraged to see a murder case actually go to trial, only to watch the it unravel as the gangbangers’ intimidation seems to have seeped in and poisoned the downtown courthouse.
“Those kids are getting the message that they can go out and do whatever they want because they’ll get away with it,” she says.
Tisi believes someone got to the Manners’ prosecution witnesses and the blame for that lies with the police.
“If they aren’t going to protect the witnesses, who’s going to speak out?” she asks. “Who’s going to put their lives in jeopardy?”
And with no one willing to take that risk, the gangsters who gunned down Jarvis and Adrian and Jordan and so many other teens can keep their fingers on the trigger, with this entire city in their crosshairs.