Maybe you should go do that.
Tell me where I’m wrong?
Putting people in jail because they are justifiably upset at police action is probably not going to fix anything, is it?
I think that probably had a lot to do with it and add in the mass confusion with over 20 people injured and it’s easy to see how they wouldn’t have gotten to the most seriously injured right away. Unless there is someone there to triage and point them to the ones that need help the most urgently they don’t just know they should walk past the mother with the screaming bullet grazed child (among others).
Well, I also said “if it was up to me”. Interpret that as a way of expressing my disgust and not a call to REALLY lock them up. Even though some were arrested for obstructing the investigation.
Thank you Moonlitherial. KarlGauss, it wasn’t an attempted whoosh. I know that heat makes people cranky, but I honestly have noticed that day long hot winds seems to make violent crimes go up. This is only anecdotal evidence, collected only by me.
I have been reading about the shooting, I’m sorry for everyone involved. The dead, the hurt, the survivors and the emergancy responders who aren’t used to that sort of thing.
What makes you think it doesn’t? It makes the cops into the enemy, and people are reluctant to cooperate with their enemies. It will also make people believe there’s no point, probably with justification; racist police are unlikely to try hard if at all to capture criminals who are killing the objects of their hatred. Just as emergency workers are unlikely to try all that hard to help them.
But this is what baffles me.
In Toronto, we now have what I’d call “a clear and present danger” that manifested itself with extraordinary intensity in terms of a number of people affected and brazenness of the attacks in past several months.
Extraordinary situations call for extraordinary measures.
So, if police reacts to a shooting in a given neighbourhood and that neighbourhood happens to be, say 80% of a certain color or ethnicity, it is expected that MOST of the people questioned and/or included in a net of an investigation will be of that color or ethnicity.
But what happens is, later on, someone sits down and goes over police reports and comes up with a headline “Police performing racial/ethnic profiling” because – gasp! – about 80% of people questioned or investigated are of a certain color or ethnicity. Statistically correct and numbers are actually documented but context totally missing.
I bet couple of months from these days you will see something similar in the printed media that will “stain” police and will “contribute” (retroactively, of course) to “a feeling in the community” that police has “a disingenuous motives”.
That’s just crazy! Something has to be done but anything you plan to do will get shot down. Net result – danger not addressed and the only hope is that it will go away. But it doesn’t.
Also, last afternoon I was listening to a Toronto 640AM talk-show where a host of the show was talking to a guy (Leslie Roberts is his name) who has a news show later that night and the topic was New York’s “stop-and-frisk” method. His comment on the NYC method was something to the effect… oh, you know, people have rights, and it’s not a good idea to use US methods of dealing with crime here in Canada because we are a different society and we have different approach - i.e. suggesting that due to basic foundations such as social net and what-not in Canada we should not go for the lowest common denominator. Then, in the next sentence he proclaims a “good news” that Toronto crime stats are not really all that bad when you compare to… Chicago! In one sentence he rejects “lowest common denominator” that is US system and then in the next one he’s making you feel good by making a comparison to that same “lowest common denominator”.
Incredible stuff…
But don’t you know it’s racist to ever correlate a certain race/ethnicity with anything negative? If the police are interviewing more people of a certain race/ethnicity it has to be racial profiling, no matter what! :dubious:
Seems absurd, when the whole city is in an uproar over this, that any would seriously believe the cops had no interest in capturing the shooters. Even if the cops were racist as hell.
What I’ve been reading leads me to believe that the far more significant factor is fear of being targeted for being a snitch.
And frankly, the police in this city are I think substantially less racist now then they have ever been. Its a process similar to the relations between the cops and the gay community - when I was growing up, Torontonians of my age may remember the infamous “Cherry Beach Express”, the bathhouse raids, etc. The general understanding was that cops = violent homophobes. That has changed over my lifetime.
The more significant concern is one of public perception generally. For whatever reason, the gun violence in this city appears disproportinately to affect the Black community (I don’t have any figures here, but this is certainly the perception, whether it is true or not). Given that many in that community are recent immigrants from places like Somalia and Jamaca, this fuels communial tensions.
And Raymond Chandler.
In many immigrant communities the newcomers bring with them a healthy loathing and distrust for any and all police activity. They may have experienced other interactions, with police, back home, that were so endemic as to be unquestioned and assumed. Raging at them, may simply be the playing out of a script they are familiar with, when shocked and stressed.
No, it excuses nothing. And police forces are rare that do not contain both racism and brutality. But maybe Torontonian’s could dial back the, ‘taking it so personally’, just a tad.
Where is the outrageous behavior anyway?
A woman cursed police when they tried to stop her from finding her children, I’d do the same damn thing.
A guy took it on his own initiative to save a gunshot victim and was detained by police, that guy is a hero.
People are refusing to talk, with that kind of crowd it is likely few if any innocent bystanders got a look at the suspects. It was a crowd and once the shots flew it was total chaos.
Unless you mean the local gossip, I’m sure the police are aware of that.
Can you identify an actual person you are hating on?
Now this one I can’t agree with. It strains credulity that two shooters both happened to end up at a big neighbourhood party, and none of the bystanders have any clue as to who either of them were or had any useful information to give.
Failing to talk to the cops stinks under these circumstances. I don’t care how racist cops have behaved in the past, by failing to talk people who do have information are condoning and abbetting these murders. They are letting down their communities - which are the ones directly affected by the violence - and everyone else in the city, too.
Or, perhaps what is happening is what usually happens, and they are just harassing people according to skin color and accomplishing nothing useful.
Seriously? Come on; cops who are “racist as hell” would be deliberately dragging their feet in order to up the death toll. That’s the sort of things bigots do; like ignoring mixed race or homosexual domestic violence in hopes that it escalates to murder, or deliberately being slow on responding to backup for gay cops in hopes that they’ll be killed. Or stand by and watch while a mob lynches someone. If there’s anything demonstrated by history, it’s just how incredibly vicious and evil bigots are.
And no, I don’t know if the local cops are that bad or not; but let’s not pretend that “racist as hell cops” wouldn’t do that and worse.
I don’t know if you’re right or wrong, but the citizens of Toronto would be staggered to learn it is the case, if you’re right.
We all lost the game! :smack::smack:
What you say may be true when they are out of the glare of publicity. It strains credulity to claim that they would put their own careers on the line simply to wreak racist hatred on the targets of their bigotry in a case which has international attention, with politicians of all camps screaming for results.
Again, this is of course assuming that they are in fact a bunch of racist bigots, for which evidence is lacking.
I can believe racists will treat people badly, even go out of their way to do so. I can’t believe they will deliberately endanger their careers and expose themselves to all sorts of bad publicity and trouble to do so in the full glare of public attention. That would require them to be both very clever (to so hide their bigotry from the world) very dedicated to bigotry as an ideal, and very, very stupid - all at the same time.
On the plus side at least our baby shooting killers are less accurate than Denvers. 
http://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/wokxt/breaking_news_11_people_shot_at_house/
Yeah, build more basketball courts…