Social Policy in Ontario

Want to address gun crime? Tackle root causes

Posted on May 25, 2016 in Child & Family Debates

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Commentary – Bigger police budgets won’t solve the alarming rise in shooting deaths in Toronto
May 25, 2016.   By REID RUSONIK

The recent shooting death of a pregnant woman has brought widespread attention to the increase in the number of gun-related deaths in Toronto over this time last year. It has also brought about a citywide reflection upon what can be done, including calls for larger police budgets and more “proactive” policing — a thinly veiled appeal for a return to robust “carding” by the police.

Deferring to these calls and returning to a practice that denies tens of thousands of men of colour in this city their most basic rights and freedoms, while dramatically cheapening the integrity of everyone else’s, would not only be constitutionally illegal and immoral, it would also ignore the root causes of gun violence.

Criminal defence lawyers have the unique opportunity to actually speak in the context of the trust-based solicitor/client relationship to the people who have armed themselves with guns. We quickly learn through such discussions that the problem is not as complex as some like our mayor and police chief would have us believe. It’s actually quite simply understood and the two required solutions equally obvious.

The people who carry guns do so, almost invariably, as part of the illegal drug trade.

Like almost any other business, the drug trade is competitive. Unlike almost any other business, the illegal drug trade is completely unregulated by law. Robbing and killing your competitors is a completely acceptable and expected form of doing business within the trade. The only consequences for these acts other than the unlikely event of the police catching you is being robbed or killed in retaliation by your victims or their business “associates” — and you are usually too young and cocky to believe what you did to them can also happen to you.

The other thing criminal defence lawyers learn very quickly is that the vast majority of the participants in the illegal drug trade at its most violent street level come from desperately impoverished backgrounds.

These, then, are the two causes of gun violence: illegal drugs and poverty. It really is this simple: poor people sell illegal drugs and rob and kill each other as result of competition over a limited market of illegal drug consumers.

Illegal drugs are profitable to sell precisely because they are illegal. The vast majority of the price the seller commands is the cost of the risk taken to bring the product to the consumer. Coca and opium, for example, are truly dirt-cheap to produce. When you buy cocaine or heroin the high price you pay isn’t because of the cost of producing the substance. Legalize them and you eliminate this risk. The government could take over their sale in the same way it sells other drugs like alcohol and use the proceeds to fund abuse and addiction treatment.

Drug abuse and addiction brings us to another side of poverty as a cause of gun violence: many poor people consume illegal drugs to escape the despair of being poor and become an essential part of the market for the drug trade.

What is required to eliminate these causes of gun violence is as clear as they are simply understood: we need to legalize drugs and ensure people have the sufficient funds and the incentive to escape poverty.

This, then, is the choice before us: react out of fear and heed the call of the police union, for example, and watch the police force get richer and more powerful while the rest of society grows poorer and weaker, less free and even less safe, or behave courageously and compassionately and address the root causes of the problem.

A pregnant women is dead because we have already chosen criminalization and oppression of rights and freedoms to control our problems rather than solving them.

There is hope.

The federal government has promised to legalize marijuana and this may reveal the good sense of legalizing all illegal drugs.

Even more hopeful, the Ontario government has announced a plan to experiment with replacing welfare with a guaranteed annual income program which would raise the incomes of the impoverished above the poverty line and provide them with an incentive to earn even more so that they could escape the need for assistance altogether.

Until we pursue these kinds of courageous and compassionate solutions with even more vigour, however, the gun death tragedies will continue — no matter how big our police forces or “proactive” their approaches.
Reid Rusonik is a Toronto criminal defence lawyer and managing partner of Rusonik, O’Connor, Robbins, Ross, Gorham & Angelini, LLP.

< https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/05/25/want-to-address-gun-crime-tackle-root-causes.html >

Tags: crime prevention, featured, ideology, participation, poverty, youth

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