Written by: Oliver, Age 16, from Centre for Immigrant and Community Services
Since I am already the mayor of Toronto, let me just cut right to the case. I think the main problem for Toronto right now is its security. As the largest city in Canada, it is not safe enough.
Toronto ranked 17th out of the 33 cities on Statistics Canada’s violent crime index, surpassed by Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Ont., Saskatoon and Edmonton. This shows that the crime rate is not that high when compared to other cities. However, we also know that it has increased a lot in the past 3 years. With just days to go before the halfway point of 2018, Toronto Police had confirmed at least 48 homicides within the city since January 1st. That’s more than double the 23 homicides we’d seen last year at this same point.
I have two suggestions to address this violence:
First, we need to rectify our police system, not through training or equipment improvements but instead through emphasizing the priorities and responsibilities of the police officers. Their jobs should be to protect the safety of citizens rather than ticketing those who are speeding.
Second, we should add more cameras to the main traffic intersections and places like banks and markets. For some cases like break-ins or robbery in small shops or markets, police forces sometimes fail to find the criminals because they have no idea where they went. Cameras are the best the method of solving this problem. The cost would be really high and there is a large group of people who believe that their privacy is more important, so it will take time to figure out the balance of how many we actually need.
That’s all what I want to say.
The “If I Were Mayor” blog series profiles the ideas of youth and rising leaders from across the GTHA as a way to add their voices to the municipal conversation. Posts have been curated by CivicAction’s Emerging Leaders Network, For Youth Initiative, Laidlaw Foundation, Toronto Youth Cabinet, Citizen Empowerment Project, Young Women’s Leadership Network, and the Centre for Community and Immigration Services. The views contained in this post are the author’s and are not reflective of CivicAction or the CivicAction Leadership Foundation.