Article content continued

“As enforcement volumes decreased, collisions have increased,” the report bluntly notes: There were nearly 60 per cent more in 2018 than in 2012.

Photo by Stan Behal/Postmedia/File

The report is astoundingly blasé about this; by rights Saunders and others should be fearing for their jobs. And the official media line is borderline bewildering: “Toronto is a growing city with increasing police demand and high priority calls for service which include an immediate risk to life or the public,” a spokesperson told the Toronto Star. Pardon? How many people have to be thumped, mangled and squashed to death by this city’s spectacularly incompetent, sociopathic drivers before it’s considered “an immediate risk to life or the public”?

Outfitting pensioners like crossing guards, and doing it at a Scarborough mall, at least evinces some understanding of the nature of the problem: fatally struck pedestrians are disproportionately elderly and the collisions mostly occur in the outer wards, Scarborough in particular. But few of them, it seems safe to assume, were listening to the rock-and-roll music too loudly on their wireless doodads. I won’t accuse Pasternak of victim-blaming for suggesting people dress up like crossing guards while out and about in Canada’s largest city, but he cannot reasonably suggest pedestrians are obligated to do so and escape ridicule.

As enforcement volumes decreased, collisions have increased

Like Const. Pablo on a grand scale, Toronto’s top cops made an apparently arbitrary decision to wind down traffic enforcement. They used their discretion, and they stuck with it even as collision figures soared, even as they saw road safety quite rightly become a leading political issue. (It is perversely helpful that the victims are so often from the outer wards, whose councillors have traditionally opposed road safety measures like lower speed limits and extra crossings.)