Chow has been visible throughout the response to the St. Clair shootings. She appeared at a media event just hours after the shooting Saturday, and at Monday’s police press conference alongside Police Chief Myron Demkiw.
“They have my full support with whatever resources they need,” she said in praising the work of police. She sought to portray the issue, at least in part, as an imported problem.
She added: “I have also spoken to the federal public safety minister (Gary Anandasangaree) and urged him to work with his American counterparts to stem the flow of illegal American guns coming onto Toronto streets.”
Hours after the St. Clair incident, a 25-year-old allegedly opened fire near a bar on the city’s waterfront before running over pedestrians in a stolen rideshare vehicle. He was free despite being arrested in a torture investigation just last year.
On Monday, Demkiw told reporters that shootings in Toronto are down 26 per cent compared to the same time last year. However, he added he was always reticent to bring up such numbers.
“It really doesn’t speak to the heart of the matter, which is how people feel,” he said. “And it’s very important for us to acknowledge that a weekend like this shakes our city … And at that moment, the statistics don’t mean that much. What matters is how people feel and what we do to restore a sense of safety and security.”
Geoffrey Dancy, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, told National Post that gun violence has no single cause or solution.
“I think that they’re kind of focused on vibes a little bit, to use the parlance of Gen Z,” he said of reactions by Bradford and Chow.
He added: “I don’t think that we should be convincing everyone that crime is a bigger problem in Toronto than it is, but I also don’t think that we should convince everyone that we don’t need to really change anything.”
He noted that New Orleans, where he lived for several years, has a gun violence homicide rate of 42 per 100,000 people. Toronto’s is less than 1 at 0.69 per 100,000.
This year to date, 14 people in Toronto have been killed by firearms and another 35 injured, with a total of 38 shootings and 92 firearm discharges, according to Toronto police statistics.
“More than a dozen people were shot in Toronto this weekend, three of them are dead, and the message to the people who ran for their lives, who were shot, to the folks caught up in the stampede of panic was look at the numbers,” Bradford said Tuesday.
“I am not here to debate numbers with anybody. I am glad that shootings are going down — the numbers should be zero – but people can’t conduct their lives according to statistics. Torontonians don’t live in a spreadsheet of numbers. Nobody is checking the dashboard before they walk out the door with their kid. They ask one simple question: do I feel safe?”
