Seeking re-election amid accusations he was soft on crime, former Mayor David Miller declared confidently in 2006 that the city had swiftly curbed the violence that rocked Toronto the previous year, declaring in a debate that “we’ve said no to guns and gangs.”He had the statistics to back it up. After a bullet-laden year that saw 52 gun-related homicides, 2006 brought a significant drop in shooting deaths and occurrences: by the end of 2006 the number of gun deaths had fallen to 28, and overall homicides were down to 67 from 79.Miller and others gave credit for the change to the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS), the provincially funded special task force created in the wake of the Summer of the Gun. The program saw specialized teams of police doing what’s called “surge policing” — upping the presence of uniform officers in areas host to shootings and gang-violence. The original idea was that TAVIS officers would serve as both as a deterrent to crime and a mechanism to collect intelligence about gang and violence-related activity. That information collection, however, ultimately earned TAVIS the notoriety of having a highest rate of any Toronto police unit for carding, the controversial practice of stopping and documenting people not suspected of a crime. The negative impact that caused, particularly on racialized communities, was among the reasons why the unit was disbanded in 2017. But amid high-profile incidents of gun violence this summer, some are now calling for the reinstatement of TAVIS-style policing and carding-gathered intelligence. Premier Doug Ford, who declared his support for TAVIS earlier this year, is committed to restoring provincial funding for anti-gang and anti-gun task forces in Toronto, a spokesperson said this week.On Thursday, as first reported by Global News, a leaked letter from a veteran Toronto police officer, Mark Hayward, blasted Mayor John Tory for being a “direct c ...
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