Every gang has its patch of ground. Freeland St. is Shred-it turf.

Shred-it trucks hang out on Freeland, which runs between Lake Shore Blvd. E. and construction-choked Queens Quay E., one block east of Yonge St., and nobody pushes them around.

When a bunch of Shred-it trucks meet up at the same time, you better move to the other side of the street, mister, while they take care of their customers.

We didn’t know Shred-it had commandeered Freeland until we came across an operation on a startling scale, at 5:30 p.m. a few weeks ago.

Five Shred-it trucks lined the east side, next to the large LCBO store and warehouse. The hum of shredders filled our ears while uniformed workers hustled boxes and bags of paper from freight trucks to the shredding units.

Two trucks with shredders in them were double-parked in the traffic lane. Vehicles turning north from Queens Quay onto Freeland had to veer into the southbound lane, while drivers exiting the LCBO parking lot couldn’t see oncoming traffic.

It was as if they owned the street, so we sidled up to a big guy with a shaved head and sunglasses and said: “Wow, five trucks. That’s a lot. Are you guys chopping up paper from the LCBO?”

He said no, it came from King St., before shooting us a look that said, “Hit the road, Jack.”

Shred-it had obviously claimed Freeland as a staging area for its downtown shredding operations, to avoid $150 tickets for parking on a busy street during rush hour.

It has long been one of the worst offenders for blocking a traffic lane for the indispensable task of turning paper into confetti, so it’s good that Shred-it is looking for alternatives. However, a private enterprise has no right to take over and dominate a street, even if it is doing the Lord’s work, so we called Shred-it for an explanation.

Bruce Andrew, its vice-president of marketing and customer experience, said Shred-it has been using Freeland as a staging area for the transfer and destruction of documents for eight years.

“Not five trucks, but maybe a couple,” Andrew said, adding that we saw an unusually large operation, and that its drivers shouldn’t double-park in a traffic lane.

Freeland isn’t very busy, compared to King St., and most of the time the trucks are parked along the curb, where they aren’t in the way, he said.

Some of its customers have agreed to a “pre-collect” system, where paper is transferred by freight truck to a shredding truck in another location, such as Freeland, where the documents are destroyed, said Andrew.

That came as a surprise; Shred-it has always said it needs to block traffic to destroy the documents as close as possible to their point of origin, to ensure an unbroken chain of custody and the highest level of security.

If it’s OK to do shredding for financial district customers on Freeland, we asked Andrew why it can’t be done on private property, perhaps in the Port Lands, where a small working space could easily be rented.

No comment, he said.

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It seems Shred-it is still clinging to the notion that it is engaged in work of such towering importance that it justifies traffic disruption on busy streets, and outright dominance on Freeland.

We’ll be holding a live chat session with readers at thestar.com at 1 p.m. Friday to discuss the Shred-it situation and any other obstacles to traffic that people want to talk about. Please join us and weigh in.