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Originally Posted by DizzyEdge
Other than knee-jerk reactions has anyone come out with a proper analysis of what is different this year in Toronto than past years which might be causing this surge?
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The main revenue source of those gangs is going to be put into the hands of the state and private sector investors in 5 days.
I don't know if they do this in Toronto (I assume so), but here in Thunder Bay, those gangs have been approaching poor people, and making offers to them that they'll fix their homes and buy them things they need (food, appliances, vehicles) on the condition that they give free room and board to those gang members, who are shuttled in and out of the city on a fairly regular basis. In one situation about a month ago, it was discovered that they had done this in a social housing townhouse complex and made corridors in the attic and basements that linked multiple units together. It was the scene of a standoff in September that lasted about a day. The dependency that they create with the legal tenants of those units gives them a strong incentive to not talk to police, so their presence is allowed to grow significantly before it is detected. They're literally behaving like a parasite or a cancer.
This is new to Canada, but it's similar to how insurgencies in the Middle East and Africa have been conducted for decades. Hamas in Palestine is known to us as a terrorist organization; to the Palestinians, it's the people who give them food, shelter, and jobs. That's the relationship a lot of people have to these gangs, and that's part of what makes them so difficult to control.
The mobility aspect—shifting people around a lot—is a tactic that's more familiar, gangs have done that for a while. But the literal parasitizing of innocent people's homes is new, and we don't seem to have a strong strategy to deal with it. Ironically, however, the townhouse complexes they're colonizing used to have actual police detachments in them. (One unit in the complex would operate as a neighbourhood police station). In Thunder Bay, there is a strong desire to see those come back.
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