Category: Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

A Little Background

Boxing Day,

for those of you not familiar with it, is a statutory holiday in Canada

(as well as the UK, Australia and New Zealand) that takes place on

December 26th. While folklorists have debated its origins for years,

it’s associated with post-Christmas bargain sales these days. Stores

typically open early and sell their wares at sale prices, often at

drastic markdown. Most stores keep the sales going all week, but Boxing

Day marks the start of the bargains — and the crowds. Sales-wise, what

the day after Thanksgiving is to Americans, the day after Christmas is to Canadians.

The Yonge/Dundas intersection

has been big hangout for Accordion City teens since I was one. It’s

right on top of a subway station, which makes it very accessible.

There’s an H&M, a Gap, and an Old Navy all within falling distance

of this intersection, and if you walk a block south, you’ll also hit a

Roots, Urban Outfitters and the entire Eaton Centre shopping mall.

Walk a block north to Yonge and Gould,

and you’ll be at the an intersection featuring HMV, Sam the Record Man

and Sunrise Records, a Foot Locker, Pizza Pizza, Future Shop and a

number of other clothing and electronics shops. For a teenager who’s

flush with a little extra Christmas gift cash, this is one of the go-to

spots downtown (the other being my old neighbourhood, Queen Street

West).

Needless to say, this intersection is always jam-packed

with people on Boxing Day. During the unemployed Christmas of 2002, I

busked the corner on Boxing Day and made $250 in about five hours.

The Shooting

On

the afternoon of boxing day, a drive-by shooting took place at Yonge

and Gould. Witness reports say that two men in a BMW were seen leaning

out the windows and firing towards the sidewalk on the west side of the

street. Although they were apparently firing at members of a rival gang,

a number of innocent bystanders, including an off-duty police officer

(who didn’t have his sidearm with him, since he was off-duty), were

injured. Worse still, a fifteen-year old girl, Jane Creba, was killed. She is the 78th homicide victim this year, 52 of which were shootings.

The two men who are believed to have been in the BMW were arrested some distance away from the shootings at Castle Frank station. One of them is 17 years old and under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, cannot be named. The other is 20-year old Andre Thompson, whose background reads like a character from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:

Mr. Thompson, who remains in custody until his next court

appearance, was released just before Christmas from Maplehurst prison

near Milton, Ont.

He had served 30 days for his role in a convenience-store robbery.

For most of the past two years he had been staying with his cousin,

Marsha Grant, 27, who has two young children and lives in a public

housing complex in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood.

Mr. Thompson, the father of a one-year-old boy, had been working at a nearby restaurant as a chef.

Fresh from the joint, there’s a “baby mama” somewhere in the picture, of no fixed address and couch-surfing in one of Toronto’s most notorious ‘hoods. This bodes ill.

The

end of the article would be laughable if the story behind it weren’t so

tragic. Thompson’s cousin, with whom he was staying, can’t quite bring

herself to believe that he was involved…

Ms. Grant said she was shocked to learn that he was caught up in the

events on Yonge Street on Boxing Day, but she strongly doubts that he

was the shooter.

“Andre would not be so stupid as to fire a gun into a crowd like that,” she said.

…but at the same time, was kicking him out because the cops were keeping an eye on him.

She last saw him on Christmas Eve, when she told him he was no

longer welcome to stay with her because of the constant police interest

in his movements.

Look,

lady, I know that sometimes one gets undue heat simply for not being

white, but your cousin just finished 30 days for robbery and has been

released into the community. It’s the police’s job to keep tabs on him.

An Inspiring Rant

Someone

I know got started on a rather long-winded rant about the recent spate

of shootings here in Accordion City, how immigrants were just taking

advantage of our open society and how unsafe he felt since coming back

from New York.

The “immigrants were just here to take advantage”

remark was easy to tackle in his case. The reason he’d come back here

from NYC was that he’d been deported.

After living there illegally for the better part of a decade, he was

stopped at the border after a quick visit here, unable to provide any

sort of proof that his primary residence was here in Canada. (If you’re

wondering about what this person was like, I can summarize him without

compromising his identity: caucasian of Anglo descent, works in

marketing — not the sort of person who gets charged with “flying while

brown”). He may not have entered the country hidden in the back of

cargo truck or started the work day by waiting for a truck to pick him

up to take him to a below-minimum-wage odd job, but he was an illegal

immigrant, there to take advantage just the same. In debate clubs

everywhere, this sort of self-contradiction on the part of your

debating opponent is called a “gift”.

He did me a favour by ranting, however: he inspired me to go and dig deeper.

The Numbers

I’d been looking up homicide statistics for Toronto when my acquaintance began his rant, so I decided to expand my search to include New York City. At the same time, Wendy, who’s from Boston, was remarking that her hometown experiencing a record number of homicides,

so I began to look up Boston’s numbers. Then, in order to get a better

comparison, I decided to look up the same stats for an American city

that is often said to be comparable to Toronto in terms of area and

population: Chicago. The table below shows the data I was able to gather:

Homicides (1998 – 2005)

(Sources are listed at the end of this entry.)

Year	Boston	Chicago	New York	Toronto
1998	34	704	924	56
1999	31	641	903	49
2000	39	631	952	61
2001	66	665	646	61
2002	60	648	575	60
2003	41	599	596	61
2004	64	448	572	65
2005 (so far)	71	444	515	78

My

Calculus prof used to always say that many math problems become much

simpler if you “draw a pretty picture”. I concur, so here’s the tabular

data above, plotted as a scatter graph with lines (click the graph to

see it at full size):

With

New York and Chicago in the picture, the y-axis scale which counts the

number of homicides) is so large that the Boston and Toronto graphs

look almost flat. To better visualize the data, I’ve made another

scatter graph showing only the Boston and Toronto data (once again,

click it to see it at full size):

The

numbers took some time to gather. It seems as though many police

departments are reticent when it comes to posting crime and especially

violent crime stats online. In the end, I found that Googling newspaper

articles for end-of-year crime tallies turned out to be my best

approach.

Quick Analysis

I’ll probably go over the

numbers and would like some discussion over the next little while, but

here’s a quick analysis based on the numbers and a day or two’s

thinking about them.

New York has remarkably improved over the

past 8 years. As you can see in the graph, there’s a steady downward

trend in the numbers. In the period covered by the graph, the number of

homicides there has dropped by 44%. If you were to go back to 1990,

this drop becomes way more dramatic: the drop from 1990’s homicide

count of 2,254 represents a decline in murders by over three-quarters.

Chicago has also improved, with 37% fewer homicides between 1998 and

now.

Toronto and Boston are experiencing the opposite: both

cities are showing an upward trend in homicides. Over the same period,

Toronto’s murders have increased by 39% and Boston’s by 108%.

Of

course, these numbers would be more meaningful if applied as a ratio of

homicides to population. Murder rates are most often measured in terms

of murders per 100,000 population. Based on metropolitan populations

(taken from Wikipedia), Toronto’s 2005 murder rate to date is 1.5,

while Boston’s is 1.2. In the meantime, Chicago’s is 4.8 and New York’s

is 2.3.

So far, we have the “what” behind the story. The “why”, and more importantly, what I like to call the “Gideon Strauss Question” — “what is to be done?”

is going to take more time. I’ll post more thoughts later, but in the

meantime, if you have any opinions or even better, data, please feel

free to put in your two cents in the comments.

Appendix: Where the Numbers Came From

Boston

• http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/

  2005/11/30/killings_equal_10_year_high/

Chicago

• http://qrc.depaul.edu/aandrews/Chicago%20Homicide/
  1%20-%20Chicago%20Homicide%20Series.doc
• http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-02-city
  -murders_x.htm
• http://www.chicagoreporter.com/2000/5-2000/05-2000/
  052000homicide.htm
• http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-murd28.html

New York

• http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm
• http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/
  ny-bc-ny–homicides-newyork
  1223dec23,0,3164277.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork
• http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-02-city-
  murders_x.htm
• http://qrc.depaul.edu/djabon/Articles/ChicagoCrime20030101.htm
• http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/summaries/reader/
  0,2061,555972,00.html

Toronto

• http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/homicide/statistics.php
• http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:XXu25G-nbr8J:
  www.urbanplanet.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/
  t7758.html+toronto+homicides+2004&hl=en

[via Paved] Here’s a flickr photoset covering Accordion City’s subway stations…

…and follow this link to see photos from last night’s subway train party. I’m going to have to catch newmindspace’s next bash, which may be streetcar-based.

Books get you chicks!

This painting is Jean-Francois de Troy’s Reading from Moliere. Don’t

ever say you never learned nuthin’ from reading this weblog.

Once a year, Canadian Manda Group, Canadian sales and marketing reps for 20 national and international publishers,

put on a sale where you can buy books at 50% off the suggested U.S.

retail price in Canadian Snow Pesos. For example, a book with a suggested US retail price of $10.00 in the US will sell for $5 Canadian.

That sales takes place for three days this week:

When: Wednesday, November 23rd through Friday, November 25th, 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Where: 165 Dufferin Street (south of King)

The poster for the sale boasts a variety of “calendars, art, gardening,

photography, sports, history, kids, fiction, travel, crafts, gift

products and much more!” I’ve been to this sale for the past couple of

years and have always emerged with Christmas presents for my more

book-oriented friends and family.

Let me take a moment to say that the readers of this blog are great

people. One particular example: Janis, who’s taken the Google Maps API

(that’s short for Application Programming Interface, a set of “hooks”

that lets one computer program be controlled by another) and used it to

create a lovely and useful web application called The Beer Hunter:

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Those of you who aren’t from the province of Ontario may be unfamiliar

with how you buy beer, wine or liquor here. Booze can only be bought at

one of four types of places:

“The Beer Store”.

Its formal name is “Brewer’s Retail”, and it used to sport signs that

bore those words, but since everyone called it “The Beer Store”, they

re-branded in the 1990s. Since the liquor stores are owned by the

provincial government, many people believe that the Beer Store is also

under the same ownership. This is not the case. The lion’s share is

owned by swillmeisters Labatt (which these days is owned by Belgium’s InBec) and Molson (actually Molson-Coors). The remaining sliver is owned by Sleeman, makers of some actually drinkable stuff. It is, as the Beer Hunter site puts it, a cartel.

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario, a.k.a. LCBO.

This one is owned by the Goverment of Ontario. A few of years ago, in

response to calls to allow privately-owned liquor stores, the

provincial government sponsored TV ads in which “Augur” from the craptactular locally-produced TV series Earth: Final Conflict

talked about how the LCBO generates CDN$1 billion in government revenue

every year, and wasn’t that just dandy? In other words — the

government spent tax money on ads talking about how great booze taxes

were. I wish I’d thought up that scam.

There is one small upside: the better LCBO branches — you know, the

ones in higher-tax bracket neighbourhoods — have a great selection and

are some of the most beautifully-appointed liquor stores anywhere.

Independent microbreweries. The good beer is available from Accordion City’s selection of micros, such as Amsterdam, Mill Street and Steam Whistle

(sometimes known as “Skunk Whistle”, as the Steam Whistle brewery tends

to serve their oldest, just-past-its-freshness date beer at events

hosted at their brewery).

 

The Wine Rack.

I know little about this independent wine store other than the fact

that they somehow got a deal in which they can sell wine and other

non-beer, non-pure-liquor beverages.

There are no other places in which you can buy beer, liquor or wine. No

beer in convenience stores (most of the civilized world lets you do

this). No wine, either (you can buy cheap wine in convenience stores in

Quebec). No private liquor stores, and no liquor in the grocery (like

in Nevada).

I’ll leave it to the readers to debate the pros and cons of Ontario’s booze distribution channels in the comments.

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The Beer Hunter is a web application that uses Google Maps’ API to

display the locations of the beer, liquor and wine stores in Toronto.

Each store type is represented by an icon, and clicking on its icon

gives you store details and whether it’s still open. Pictured below is

the nearest liquor store to Tucows, where I work:

This is a very useful site. Janis, a salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword — well done!