Toronto: Victims black in 42% of non-domestic killings, Analysis shows vast majority of suspects in those slayings also black

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[Not something you're likely to see often in US papers but the stats are actually higher.] Christie Blatchford National Post

Friday, November 08, 2002 Kevin Van Paassen, National Post

Appeals from Julian Fantino, Toronto's police chief, for witnesses and help from the public in solving a recent slew of murders often fall on deaf ears. TORONTO - Toronto's black community is being gutted by gun violence.

The toll is absolutely staggering: With less than two calendar months left until the new year, a total of 36 black Torontonians, most of them in the prime of their lives and many in their teens and early 20s, have been slain in the last 22 months, all but three in shootings.

At least nine other young black men and women have been injured.

In the vast majority of cases where arrests have been made or suspect descriptions given by witnesses, the alleged perpetrators are also black.

Given the number of shootings in which multiple gun-toting suspects were arrested, a total of 20 other black citizens, many of them as young as those they are accused of killing, now face charges of first- or second-degree murder or manslaughter and remain in jail, awaiting trial.

Many cases are unsolved, with homicide detectives stymied by the widespread lack of co-operation they have received from predominantly black witnesses.

In some of these, police believe they know very well who the killers are, but without witnesses willing to come forward to identify them as the shooters, they can't make arrests.

In one astonishing case, Audette Shephard, the mother of a teenage murder victim, has had in her own living room an acquaintance of her slain son, who she and the police are certain knows who the killer is but who steadfastly refuses to say.

With the tally of lives lost outright, others wasted and still more affected by the horror of seeing such violence or the difficulty of trying to live safely and civilly within it, the effect is little short of catastrophic.

Mrs. Shephard, whose 19-year-old son Justin was gunned down in a June 23, 2001, slaying that remains unsolved despite family appeals and a reward recently boosted to $100,000, describes the violence as akin to "trying to make your race extinct."

Cruelly, due to the current furor over the alleged race profiling practices of Toronto Police, few are willing to even discuss the phenomenon of "black on black" violence and the disproportionate amount of this sort of crime that exists within the city's diverse black community.

Last week, as a coalition of several dozen black leaders met to demand action from Ontario Premier Ernie Eves on the race profiling part of the equation, they refused point-blank to discuss the violence in the community -- at least arguably the flip side of the same coin.

And this week, with the race profiling issue still a political hot potato -- Charles Dubin, the former Ontario Supreme Court chief justice appointed by Police Chief Julian Fantino to review the force's practices, abruptly withdrew from the task -- police, who are prohibited by force policy from analyzing crime data by race, were skittish even about discussing information that has been long in the public domain.

The race profiling debate was sparked by a recent series in The Toronto Star and based on the newspaper's own analysis of raw police data it obtained under a freedom of information request at first refused by the force. The paper alleges that the numbers it studied -- in two major areas, drug arrests and traffic stops -- show that blacks are subjected to harsher treatment than whites and tend to suggest the force is systemically racist.

This side of the paper's analysis -- reportedly pronounced sound by an independent expert the paper has refused to identify -- has been readily accepted as accurate by black leaders, who say it merely confirms both what earlier studies found and the anecdotal experience of their young people.

Also undisputed by black leaders, but receiving far less attention from all quarters, are the numbers the Star revealed a week into the series and which the paper says show that blacks -- who according to 1996 census data make up only 8.1% of Toronto's population -- represent almost 27% of those arrested for offences that are the most violent (murders, assaults, sexual assaults and gun charges) and that, as police responses to 911 calls or reports of gunfire, allow for little if any exercise of discretion, or possible bias, from officers.

But there is anecdotal evidence on this other side of the equation too, a perception shared by some outspoken black leaders such as Dudley Laws of the Black Action Defence Committee, crime reporters, ordinary front-line officers and the like, that many of the shootings in the city are the result of black-on-black crime. I decided to try to sort fact from fiction.

As of this writing, there have been 48 homicides in Toronto this year, and in 2001, 60.

From each total, I arbitrarily removed domestic crimes -- husband kills wife; girlfriend kills boyfriend; parent kills child; child kills parent; and murder-suicides. These are the cases that are usually easily and quickly resolved by police and are what used to be considered, for lack of a better term, traditional killings.

That left, for this year, 38 murders, and for 2001, 46 murders.

Establishing the race of victim and accuseds or suspects was no easy task.

For the victims' race, the Toronto Sun, with its police and crime bent, was the best resource; the paper usually covers every murder in the city, and usually interviews grieving relatives about the victim's background and usually also runs pictures of the slain.

For instance, it was in the main from the paper's stories, quoting family members of the deceased, usually at the funerals of their loved ones, that I found that no fewer than 12 of the 36 black victims, or one-third, were Jamaican-born or had significant Jamaican connections. Given that Jamaicans account for little more than 2% of Toronto's population, this number seems disproportionately high. For the race of suspects, police often release descriptions of the wanted that include skin colour immediately after a killing and particularly when public safety is at issue -- when, for instance, as is often the case, dangerous suspects armed with handguns are on the loose.

Photographs -- often police pictures, taken at earlier arrests, for many of those both killed and accused had significant criminal records -- routinely accompany these news releases.

But the photographs are only posted on the force's Web site for a short time, and as soon as a suspect is arrested and becomes an accused before courts, race disappears as an official descriptor in police releases.

Armed with several hundreds of sheets of these news releases and Sun stories and photographs, I managed to identify the race of virtually all victims and most suspects and/or accuseds.

Of the 38 non-domestic murders this year, 16 victims -- or 42% -- were black. In 11 of those 16 killings, either police have charged someone who is black or witnesses have described suspects as black. Worth noting is that many of the nine of these 16 cases where the victims were black and which remain unsolved are very recent.

In one that was part of a slew of slayings within two hours in the early morning hours of Oct. 27, police have one suspect -- a white 18-year-old named James Brown -- in custody in the death of 21-year-old Omark Byron Simpson. Three black males, wanted in one or another of the four shootings that morning, are still being sought.

Of the 46 non-domestic killings last year, 20 victims -- or 43% -- were black. In 16 of those 20 killings, either police have charged a black person or witnesses have described the suspects as black. Thirteen of these 20 killings remain unsolved. The news releases also offer evidence of the police difficulty in finding witnesses; many virtually beg for help or directly plead for witnesses "with the courage" to come forward, and many times, victims' mothers have appeared before the microphones to make the same appeal.

Many of the killings were both spectacularly vicious and audacious, with the gunmen clearly operating in the oft-correct belief that they will be protected by the code of silence -- equal parts misguided loyalty, fear and among the lawless sometimes a desire to take the law into their own hands -- that governs the world of the young.

Shaun Myers, for example, was standing outside a nightclub early on the morning of March 3 last year. The 29-year-old was with a group of people in an adjacent parking lot, enjoying some post-party jerk chicken, when he was surrounded by as many as six men. Shot and wounded, he ran for his life, but was literally run down by the six, some of whom stood over his fallen body and pumped three more shots into him.

Two days later, in a spring snowstorm, 20-year-old Yemi Oduwole was shot in the back; witnesses reported seeing four male blacks fleeing the scene.

On June 10 the same year, brothers Shane and Christopher Fung, 26 and 31 respectively and originally from Guyana, were attending a party in a crowded apartment in the Jane-Finch corridor of high-rise housing projects in the city's northwest end.

The younger Mr. Fung was killed, his brother shot in the stomach and so seriously wounded he spent months recovering.

Yet even in such close confines, with about 50 partygoers present, the only real information police have after 17 months is what the results of forensic tests tell them -- that there were at least five different firearms used, and a large number of shots fired, in that apartment. Yet witnesses are as scarce as hen's teeth, and while surely some were diving for cover, it simply defies logic that no one saw who drew weapons.

In at least one case, it's possible that had police been called sooner, a victim might have been saved.

Twenty-two-year-old Gavin Hunter, who died Oct. 12 last year, was found sitting in his still-running car in Etobicoke only when the garbage truck came to pick up the trash that morning.

Yet apparently nearby residents later reported hearing gunshots hours earlier.

While some of the slain were players in the various loosely affiliated criminal gangs -- these are numerous, but fluid; Mr. Myers' killer or killers, for instance, are reportedly members of the "Versace Gang," who purport to dress in the expensive clothes sold under the Gianni Versace designer label -- others were innocents or bystanders who were in the proverbial wrong place at the worst time.

Few cases are more moving than Justin Sheppard's (he spelled his last name differently than his mother).

He was the half-brother of Jamaal Magloire, who plays for the New Orleans Hornets of the National Basketball Association and in September donated $50,000 to double the reward in Justin's murder, and, as a student at Eastern Commerce High School, Justin was filled with promise himself, with an offer of a prep school scholarship in the United States.

If it wasn't clear whether he would be able to make good on his potential -- he had some rocky years in adolescence and had only recently returned to school -- what is incontrovertible is that he was trying to stay on the straight and narrow, and that he had some terrific people, chiefly his mom, in his corner.

Instead, early on that June morning, he was shot twice in the head as he crossed a footbridge that joins the St. Jamestown neighbourhood where he lived and affluent Rosedale.

His mother, a longtime manager with a major bank, has twice joined homicide detectives in making an emotional plea for witnesses to come forward, but her appeal, like others made by other mothers and the police, have fallen upon deaf ears. Mr. Sheppard's murder remains unsolved.

The most hurtful part, she told the Post in a telephone interview from her office yesterday, is that some of the young men who knew her son "come into my house, say 'Hi mum', and they know." She said she wants to cry out, "How could you? If I were a different type of person I'd go get a gun and shoot them myself, every one of them."

She said she has spoken directly to one mother, whose son she believes knows who killed Justin, a conversation she described as rife with pain. "You have one who has the loss of a son and another who [could end up spending] his life in prison. But I talked to the mother and said, put yourself in my shoes, if you love your son, talk to him, let him do the right thing. And she said yes, she would tell him he should talk to the police, and the next thing I knew, the mother called a lawyer and the lawyer called the police and said my client isn't interested in speaking to the police."

Mrs. Shephard's frustration was palpable: "It's within your own community," she moaned yesterday, "your own people. They know what happened to Justin and they won't say.

"If young people start speaking up, these criminals will know they don't have a safe haven anymore, and it will end ... loyalty, they say. Loyalty to whom? They [the criminals] only get more brazen. Until it happens, until the community itself, and young people, say, 'Enough', and if they know somebody has a gun, or is planning to do something and they say, 'I'm going to take responsibility for this and make it happen' ... But they [young people] enter their own world."

Mrs. Shephard is the chair of UMOVE, an acronym for United Mothers Opposing Violence Everywhere. The group has 17 members, all but five of them black women, and most of these who have lost children to gun violence.

Mrs. Shephard is adamant that one need not be a bereaved black mother to join the group.

But the facts are that the moms of the following would qualify by that grim measure: In chronological order, for 2001, Shaun Myers, 29; Chad Wynter, 25; Yemi Oduwole, 20; George Ellison, 18; Cleamart Douglas, 25; Segun Farquharson, 24; Shane Fung, 26; Wayne Anthony Reid, 26; Justin Sheppard, 19; Ansel Adams, 31; Sydney Hemmans, 19; Gregory George Whittaker, 21; Damien Barnaby, 20; Omar Christian, 25; Michael Lewis, 29; Paul Patrick Watson, 34; Cecil Hinds, 33; Gavin Hunter, 22; Roy Gonsalves, 30; Mohamoud Ahmed, 20, and, this year, Chemere Roache, 18; Shem Pascal, 16; Amar Young, 19; Rhoan Gooden, 32; David Guzylak, 19; Mahad Tahlil, 20; Omar McFarlane, 25; Jason Campbell, 17; Norris Allen, 21; Clyde Lewis, 28; Gary George Wynter, 35; Kevin and Jermaine Ebanks, 27 and 18 respectively; Omark Simpson, 21; Kevin Davis, 20, and Eric Mutiisa, 23.

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2002


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