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Toronto deputy mayor urges police to release more details about street festival shooting
Toronto Police have “good clear video” of what happened during the shootings at the Salsa on St. Clair festival, according to the city’s Deputy Mayor Mike Colle, who is frustrated police have not released more details about what actually happened.
He said he learned this from shopkeepers on the strip of St. Clair Avenue West who handed over the videos from their security cameras.
The shootings took place Saturday night around 8 p.m., leaving two people dead, five injured, a neighbourhood traumatized, and the future of Toronto’s enthusiastic hosting of street festivals in an uneasy doubt.
The men killed were targeted and known to each other, police said, but they have declined to say whether either or both were among the shooters, or whether they may have killed each other. Shaquan Quashie, 25, and Cesar Vernaza, 20, both died of their gunshot wounds, one at the scene and the other in hospital.
Toronto Police Service Chief Myron Demkiw said on Monday police can only confirm the names of the two deceased, the fact police believe they were targeted as opposed to random victims, and that two guns were “recovered at the scene.” He made a point of sharing statistics that shootings are down in Toronto this year by 26 per cent.
News that the St. Clair shootings have been captured on clear video is likely to increase pressure on police to clarify the potential role played by the two dead men, especially now that community vigils have been held, Colle said.
“You should check before you have a vigil to see who the vigil is about, and are these people worthy of a vigil,” Colle said, calling it a “slap in the face” to residents and trampled bystanders.
The Globe and Mail reported Wednesday that both men lived in the same west end neighbourhood, that Quashie has pleaded guilty to possessing a prohibited firearm, and Vernaza has pleaded guilty to possessing cars obtained by crime
Colle said this came to him as no surprise.
“Everybody’s got these proposals about how to make these festivals safer, how to bring in more police, more fencing, etc. Those are all well intentioned but in the long run we need to deal with the root problem here, out of control people who have handguns and will have a total disregard for anybody else to basically play out their gangland feuds,” Colle said. “That is what we’ve got to deal with.”
The Toronto Police Service’s emphasis on Toronto’s safety, in the absence of hardly any new detail about these crimes, has caused unrest in the few days since the shootings.
Councillor Brad Bradford, who is a candidate for mayor in this fall’s election, also said at a press conference that police were “tone deaf” to emphasize Toronto’s safety during such an urgent and unresolved investigation.
The night of the shootings, on the scene on St. Clair, Colle seemed to give voice to a widespread shocked dissent when he interrupted a press conference, stepping up to the microphones and saying his piece in evident frustration.
“I live here,” Colle said, as the scrum was about to wrap up. “We just want to say how disgusting this is, this gangster violence in a peaceful family festival…. To shoot up a festival indiscriminately, these thugs must be caught, no bail, put ‘em away for 20 years. This threatens all our public events.”
Colle’s interruption seemed to be sparked by police downplaying the significance of this event to people’s feelings of public safety. For example, asked by a journalist whether gun violence was just part of life in a big city, Toronto Police Service Deputy Chief Frank Barredo had just called Toronto “one of the safest cities in the world… but we are 3 million people and unfortunately we are not completely immune to some of the things that happen globally. But Toronto is an extremely safe city.”
Barredo had called the shootings brazen, despicable and unacceptable, but said he was cautiously trying to avoid misinforming the public during a live investigation.
“This seemed to be an exchange of gunfire between individuals targeting each other,” Barredo said.
Barredo let Colle say his piece, and then closed the scrum by sharing the phone number of the homicide squad and asking for witness video.
Colle’s view of the appropriate political response to the shootings involves bail and sentencing reform as much as enhanced police operations and city bylaws.
“You’ve got people that have no fear of any consequences,” Colle said. “So that’s what the feeling is among these gun losers, I call them, they feel they can get away with this stuff.”
He wants to see legislatures recalled to pass tough on crime legislation. He also described measures more within the city’s control, such as its recent purchase of “hostile vehicle mitigation barriers,” which are heavy metal equipment that can block off streets, and are more cost efficient than parking dump trucks at intersections. He said he wants to see greater use of overhead security cameras for facial recognition at festivals.
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