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Violent urban street crime such as homicides and fatal shootings are caused by many factors and their frequency varies from year to year.

But one of the major reasons Toronto has recorded its most deadly year ever for homicides — 91 with six weeks to go compared to the previous high of 89 for all of 1991 — is obvious.

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That was the decision by the former Ontario Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne to ban police carding (street checks) on the grounds it was racist.

My Toronto Sun colleague Chris Doucette, using the Freedom of Information Act, has carefully demonstrated the clear link between the ending of carding and the subsequent annual increases in shootings, gun deaths and homicides.

(See“Killing Carding: The deadly toll of putting street checks on ice”, Sun, Sept. 29, 2018 and “Violent city:Deadly toll of killing proactive policing”, Sun, Sept. 9, 2018.)

That said, correlation alone isn’t evidence of causation — just because two things occur at the same time doesn’t automatically mean one caused the other.