The tall, lanky man, wearing white from head to toe — save for indigo sneakers — is caught on surveillance cameras at River St. in Regent Park.

Appearing from the right side of the screen, he takes 11 steps. He marches up to a man who’s facing the opposite direction with a cigarette in one hand, a walking cane in the other. It’s after midnight on May 23.

The man in white raises a gun to the back of the other man’s head. He lowers it just as quickly. Police say he appeared to pull the trigger, but the gun did not fire. Eight minutes later on the same street, the gunman can be seen with another armed man. Together, they chase down a 42-year-old man. He’s shot, but he survives.

It’s another eruption of gunfire in a year that, as of May 28, had seen 162 shootings in Toronto, according to the latest police data.

If the pace is maintained, it will be the fourth straight year in which Toronto has seen the number of shooting victims increase. In 2015 there were 429 victims; there were 581 in 2016, 594 in 2017 and, so far, there have been 215 this year. The numbers surpass even 2005, Toronto’s notorious “year of the gun,” when 52 people were killed by guns and there were 359 shooting victims.

“A rise in shootings in one week doesn’t make a trend line, but there is a tendency for one set of shootings to lead to another set of shootings. Basically, revenge shootings, or shootings that have to do with territory,” said Irvin Waller, a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa.





There is a general uptick in shootings and homicides associated with street gangs in urban areas, he said.

Last month, there were six shooting homicides in Toronto. The youngest victim was 17. They were all male. No arrests have been made.

Three of the victims — Venojan Suthesan, 21; Matthew Staikos, 37; Israel Edwards, 18 — were gunned down just last week.

On Friday, Mayor John Tory countered criticisms about police staffing numbers, saying more surveillance cameras could be installed in crime hot spots to help with investigative efforts.

But Waller said Canadian cities have not prioritized violence prevention, which is proven in some cities to have reduced crime by half.

“I think the really sad thing about what is happening generally in urban areas is that the city council have been very slow to come to grips with what’s going on and do the things that are known to work,” he said.

According to a 2016 brief by the Canadian Municipal Network on Crime Prevention, outreach services for vulnerable youth in high-crime neighbourhoods reduced offence rates by 63 per cent and crime by 16 per cent.

Councillor Mike Layton (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina) said he believes intervention programs would be more effective in curbing crime. He cites inequality and poverty among the root causes of crime.

“Rather than look at that, for generations, we’ve said let’s focus on the band-aid solution. That has ended up with a rather significant portion of the city’s budget going to policing,” Layton said.

“But we haven’t looked at investing, with the same rigour, into the programs to address part of the cause.”

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At various media engagements throughout the week, Tory reiterated that the city is redoubling its efforts to deploy police where they’re needed.

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“We are hiring more police officers as we speak. We are redeploying police officers so they’ll spend less time directing traffic and manning speed radar guns … so that police officers will have more time to be in the community and dealing with issues related to keeping the city safe,” he said at a Friday press conference.

Internal processes created to allow easier movement of front-line officers between divisions have made the police response more nimble.

“That is working its way into the way we’re structured,” said police spokesperson Mark Pugash.

“We have an ability that we didn’t have before to augment the resources, and I can tell you that homicide investigators are getting support from all over the service.”

So far, police have no evidence that bystanders have been killed in any of the recent fatal shootings, said Pugash.

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