It was mere minutes before Chief Mark Saunders took to the podium for his end-of-year state of the union press conference on policing and crime in Toronto.Shooting. Driftwood Ave. Male teenager.Rushed to hospital with serious injuries.And so it goes. So it has gone throughout all of 2018, a record year for both shootings and homicides, for exceptional urban tragedies.“This was a unique year,” Saunders put it Thursday morning, mildly.“Not only did we have a high-profile homicide case to look after, we also had to respond to two mass casualty attacks that left a tremendous loss of life and lots of injuries for our citizens.’’High-profile homicide case: A serial killer preying on the gay community, though Saunders had assured there was no such thing last December, despite tracking orders for the suspect obtained just days earlier, leading ultimately to the arrest of Bruce McArthur on Jan. 18.Mass casualty attacks: The deliberate van rampage on north Yonge St. in April that killed 10 and injured 16, some critically; the lone shooter carnage on Danforth in July that killed two innocents and wounded 13.“Two mass casualty incidents in such a short period of time,” said the chief, grimly, recalling a personal nadir for 2018. “I think that was a game-changer. It’s one thing when you’re dealing with gunplay. It’s another thing when you’re walking down the street and looking over your shoulder or you’re sitting in a restaurant with family and friends and the next thing…“The general public really felt stung by the two mass casualties back to back and it’s still there.”A year of ominous firsts for Toronto: An unprecedented 96 murders, 51 of them by gunfire; police had recorded 406 shootings as of Sunday. Mass carnage by disturbed individuals, the kind of extremist slaughter we believed, in our smug naïveté, only happened elsewhere.So, yes, the statistics were skewe ...
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