A visibly frustrated police Chief Mark Saunders said despite arrests in a recent wave of shootings across the city, policing won’t be the solution to ongoing violence.“We are not going to arrest our way out of this,” Saunders told reporters at police headquarters Friday morning, calling for a “multi-faceted” approach to addressing gun violence in his second news conference about the surge in violence in the past week.He said of the recent shootings, they “by and large have street gang connotations to them or are street gang related.” He said that doesn’t mean at times innocent people are not impacted and acknowledged it has been traumatic for those people.There have been 19 incidents since Aug. 3, including a daytime shooting in East York on Friday that killed one man and injured another person.Saunders said the shootings are a reality for many communities and are primarily located in areas that form a “U” shape of neighbourhoods in the city — parts of northwest Toronto, downtown, and Scarborough — that are stuck in a cycle of poverty and where people lack access to opportunities for education and jobs.“We need to make sure that we have mechanisms in place for these young men to not want to take up arms as a means of moving on to the next day,” he said. “Those people in those communities — when I go to townhalls — live like this every single day and they’re saying, ‘I put my son or daughter in a bathtub with a mattress so I can sleep at night.’”Putting people in jail and having them released back into still marginalized communities is not a solution, he said.“We have seized 536 guns to date. We’re continuing to make arrests. We’ve laid thousands of charges. We’ve arrested hundreds of people. The street gang issue is alive and well,” Saunders said when pressed on a police action plan. “If the expectation ...
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