Arctic Mark in Stanley Park

It wasn't bad enough that two men (both, not surprisingly, "known to police") were gunned down in their car a couple of blocks from my apartment only a week after I moved to the Marpole neighbourhood of South Vancouver; yesterday a federal report announced that Vancouver has the worst (ie. highest) rate of gun crimes in Canada for 2007. The silver medal went to Winnipeg, with only the bronze (oh the shame!) being awarded to my hometown of Trauma, Onterrible.  If only these local crime scenarios were as harmlessly innocent and whimsical as the Mary Pickford movie clip shown above.

In fact, according to police, the majority of Vancouver-area gun crimes are related to the viciously competitive illegal drug trade. Unfortunately for the rest of us law-abiding citizens, the bitter rivalry between criminal gangs in the lower mainland has been erupting more and more frequently in wild shootouts in public places, often resulting in injury or death to innocent bystanders. There have been a disturbingly high number of these kinds of incidents recently, and the nearby impromptu memorial at the stoplight at Granville & 70th is a haunting reminder to me and everyone else in my neighbourhood that these kinds of crimes can happen anywhere, anytime.

So should I be worried about going out in public in and around Vancouver?  Not on your life.  It used to irritate me no end back in Toronto when I'd meet someone who lived elsewhere in Ontario, and the first thing they'd say upon hearing I was from Toronto was something like: "Wow! You must be brave!! Isn't it dangerous just stepping outside your door, with all those bullets flying everywhere from all those drive-by shootings and gangland slayings going on all the time?" Now, one has to wonder: where did (and do) these people - not all from peaceful small towns, by the way - get their impression of Toronto as an all-out criminal war zone? It may sound like an easy out, but I blame the media, especially the local CTV nightly newscast, although there are plenty of other guilty parties out there.  How else to explain the puzzling fact that, despite steadily declining or static crime statistics over the last 10-15 years, the public's perception of crime is that it is on a sharp but steady increase.

My admittedly paranoid theory is that the large media conglomerates like to fan the flames of middle-class (sub)urban fear and paranoia by jumping on every incident of crime, devoting more attention to it than it deserves, and framing it so that it takes on a distorted, inaccurately broad and urgent social significance. Why do they do this?  Oh, I don't know...maybe because they are owned by the same conservative power brokers who have a vested interest in hard-line "law & order" political agendas, and how better to stir up public support for these agendas than by portraying every incident of crime in the city as evidence of a terrible crisis in public safety, which threatens to hit comfortable middle and upper-class voters right where they live?  (Yes, I know - Michael Moore and Naomi Klein called, and they want their rants back.)

Anyway, when confronted yet again with a distorted image of Toronto from yet another non-Torontonian, I would never tire of telling that person that, impossible as it might seem, in my 40 years of living in Toronto, I had never once heard a gunshot, seen a mugging, witnessed a crime, or been a victim myself of a crime.  Having said that, I'd be the first to admit that there are certain streets and neighbourhoods where one should not venture, especially alone and at night, and especially if you are a woman (at least, a woman without a black belt in martial arts, or her very own stylish personal taser).

Now, some might say that my entirely benevolent experience of Toronto doesn't reflect the crime-ridden reality of the rest of the population. Well, I do admit to spending very little time in parking lots of crowded nightclubs at 3 am, just as large numbers of inebriated and often belligerent young revellers come spilling out onto the pavement, looking for trouble, and often finding it; so I guess my perspective is clearly biased and not very representative of the general population. 

On a very serious and tragic note, it was exactly the above scenario that led to the shocking death a year ago of 19-year-old Orin Felix, a very talented and promising former student of mine at Pine Ridge S.S. in Pickering. (You can Google his name if you want to read the media reports of his death.)  In Orin's case, he was - true to his character - trying to break up a fight in just such a parking lot in Ajax late on a Thursday night, and he was stabbed to death for his trouble. I was utterly shocked and saddened and incredulous when I heard of his death while still up in Ulukhaktok last spring, via an email from a friend back at Pine Ridge. What a tragic and senseless loss!

And yet I'm not about to adopt an attitude of fear and paranoia just because there has been a rash of gun-related crimes in the Vancouver area in the last few months, some of which have resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians. One positive result of this recent crime wave is that, by all accounts, the police, local government officials, and the general public are all becoming fed up with the escalating "Wild West" atmosphere (sorry to stoop to a media-friendly buzz-phrase, but I couldn't resist throwing one in).  There seems to be a strong public consensus that something substantial needs to be done on a large scale to get these drug-gang wars under control.  We'll see how that plays out in the next few months.

In the meantime, in the immortal words of Sgt. Phil Esterhaus from "Hill Street Blues":

"Let's be careful out there!!"

P.S. If you need a break from all the doom and gloom of crime statistics, feel free to peruse the two new Photo Galleries I've just added, combining Nov. & Dec. into one, and doing the same for Jan. & Feb. I promise you won't find anything in there more dangerous than my recent first-ever snowshoeing expedition with Bryn up Hollyburn Mountain in West Vancouver's stunning Cypress Park (although we were harrassed and robbed of food scraps by a very bold little bird, as you'll see).