A shooting in Toronto’s Danforth neighborhood on July 22 occurred just before Toronto city officials are set to decide on a revised gun violence plan. These changes come in the wake of a vague risk warning causing confusion in city streets earlier in the month, which caused experts to revisit how threat assessments are communicated to the public.
The motion, if passed, will call for funding for $29 million for community services such as programs for youth violence intervention, employment, trauma recovery and mental health, as well as $15 million to support enforcement and enhanced surveillance initiatives in the next two years, according to the CBC. Additional surveillance, including a $4 million “ShotSpotter” system that helps locate the source of the gunshots using microphones, could be introduced.
Earlier in the month, a vague risk threat had increased police presence around downtown areas and attractions, but little information communicated to the public. This led experts to reconsider how threat levels should be disseminated in terms of transparency. “If (police) provide too much transparency on every single incident that occurs, you might end up with public panic and the public going, ‘Oh my god I can’t go anywhere’,” Satyamoorthy Kabilan, a national security specialist with the Conference Board of Canada think tank, told The Globe and Mail. “The flip side is, police have to take a lot of these incidents seriously and act on them.”
Sources:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/city-council-gun-violence-plan-1.4758435
