EDITORIAL: Here’s how to fight random violence

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Enough with the platitudes about random street violence in Toronto.

Enough with politicians declaring “enough is enough” while nothing changes.

Enough with saying innocent people going about their lives when they were stabbed, shot or burned to death by strangers while walking on a street, waiting at a subway station or riding on a bus were “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Nonsense. Their murderers were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Enough with saying Toronto remains a relatively safe city compared to others of comparable size.

We don’t live in other cities and according to police data, major crimes in Toronto today are exponentially worse than they were less than a decade ago.

Making us safer requires action by all three levels of government — municipal, provincial and federal.

Mayor John Tory and council need to lead the way by giving police the resources to put more officers on our streets and to tackle gang and gun violence.

Premier Doug Ford needs to lead the way by providing additional provincial resources to police, along with giving Toronto the resources it needs to decently house and treat the mentally ill, both the minority who commit violent crimes and the majority far more likely to be victims of crime.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau needs to lead the way by toughening laws for gun crime, not weakening them, which is what his government has been doing. He needs to focus on the major source of gun violence in Toronto — not hunters and farmers using legal long guns but warring street gangs, using illegal handguns smuggled in from the U.S.

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Justices of the Peace need to stop granting easy bail to repeat violent offenders with a history of gun violence.

Judges need to use the sentences we already have in our laws — we don’t need more laws — to send the message that random violence means major prison time.

Parole boards need to make public safety their top priority, not an afterthought.

All of these measures will reduce random violence in Toronto, but nothing will ever happen without political will and effective leadership at the very top.

The tragedy is that leadership doesn’t exist today anywhere in government and until it does, nothing will change.