Known to police: Violent crime in Weston-Mt. Dennis is down, youth feel harassed by Toronto police

In this episode from the first season, drug dealer Avon doubles a bounty on the heads of rival Omar, a likeable yet deadly dealer, and his crew. Street retribution for a rip-off that will, naturally, go unreported to the authorities.

What the boys and girls in the room, most of whom are in their early teens, see in the program is a reflection — albeit magnified — of what goes down in this and other at-risk neighbourhoods in Toronto.

Not that any of these young people live that life. Not yet, and hopefully never.

But this is a place where single families struggle, unemployment is high and there is a general lack of opportunity. This is what kids see out their windows: on Aug. 25, 2010, four men were shot in a housing complex next to 121 Humber, including a 19-year-old with a bullet in his chest, a 17-year-old with two bullets to the face, and an 18-year-old with gunshots to each of his legs.

Two years earlier, just outside 121 this time, four men were also shot.

This 14-storey Toronto Community Housing building near Weston Rd. and Black Creek Dr. towers above subsidized townhouses and tidy housing stock and industrial pockets still left in the southeast part of Weston-Mt. Dennis.

The building is looking better these days, yet there are reminders nearby of the fact the neighbourhood’s been left behind. At the nearest bus stop, the shelter dates back to the City of York, a relic of amalgamation, now 14 years in the past. A sign on the shelter instructs anyone witnessing vandalism to call a phone number that no one answers.

It’s also part of an area where Toronto police, following a string of homicides, targeted the area using officers who stop, question and document people in public spaces, young people more than others.

Many of them are black and simply going about their daily business.

Welcome to 12 Division, a police district in the old City of York where, by the Star’s count, there have been 34 homicides since 2005 and many of the victims have been young men of colour.

This is the story of the area, particularly of police Patrol Zone 121, which sits just north of 121 Humber, stretching from the Humber River in the west to the railway tracks near Caledonia Rd. in the east, and sandwiched north and south by Lawrence and Eglinton Aves. W.

The relationship between the youth and police here, in the words of one youth worker, is “toxic.” Yet, there are much fewer dead bodies, fewer funerals, than a half-decade ago.

There is also an acknowledgement that crime and policing are but one challenge here.

In an era of austerity and program cuts and no new funding that would benefit local youth and families, you might expect not a single good thing to come out of this neighbourhood. But you would be wrong.

Weston-Mt. Dennis’ biggest assets are its people, including community workers and leaders and the young faces in the TV room watching The Wire. Also, a police division is trying to reach out — and a new unit commander is seeking to make deeper connections with youth.

Photography Drive is now a dead end but once led to a Kodak plant. Pigeons roost in Building no. 9 — the only remaining structure. On a cold February day, a woman climbs the stairs from Eglinton Ave. and dumps bread crumbs for the birds.

“This riding is one in which jobs have fled,” Mike Sullivan, the NDP MP for York South-Weston, said at a recent community meeting that focused on youth issues, including employment.

There are no new meaningful jobs to be had. Good manufacturing jobs are gone, replaced by low-paying service jobs.

Where a former CCM bicycle plant once sat, there is now a Tim Hortons. Along a stretch of Weston Rd., bicycle-shaped lamppost lights twinkle to life at dusk, a nod to the past.

While billions are being spent on infrastructure improvements and other construction in the area, including the Crosstown TTC Eglinton subway and an airport rail link, local residents are not the ones getting the work.

Along the Eglinton Ave. W. strip east of Keele St., some storefronts sit empty. Other businesses close to the old City of York city hall, now a traffic court, cater to those facing legal woes. But there is also a bakery and a decent place for a beer and jerk chicken, which on most days is grilled on a sidewalk barbecue pit. It is not unusual along this stretch to be able to find a bite to eat, even a haircut, at 4 a.m.

Patrol Zone 121 has the highest black population of all of the city’s 72 patrol zones. Of the 43,000 people who live here, 28 per cent are black.

Weston-Mt. Dennis, to the west side of the patrol zone, is also the poorest of the city’s 13 “priority” neighbourhoods. Latch-key kids care for siblings while single parents work to make ends meet. With few indoor spaces where they can swim and play, children spend their time in front of televisions.

On the street, there can be trouble.

There are 181 uniformed officers in 12 Division, which is divided into three patrol zones, the boundaries of which were altered in late 2011 to include parts of the former 31 Division to the north.

Within the old boundaries of patrol zone 121, there have been about 20 homicides since 2005, which Chief Bill Blair said in an interview was the highest tally of all of the city’s 72 patrol zones.

By the Star’s count, 13 of the 20 homicides involve firearms and young male victims, most of them black. Arrests have been made in about half those cases, a solve rate that is not unusual for cases involving street violence. Many are retribution killings — cases of street justice.

Toronto police has deployed its Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) in the division. It involves officers from the division and ones borrowed from elsewhere in the city.

Their work has taken guns off the streets, and their continued heavy presence has, to be sure, resulted in fewer bodies and fewer violent crimes.

From 2008 to 2009, it also resulted in a 450 per cent increase in the number of document cards kept on people who were stopped and questioned in the patrol zone, says Toronto police chief Bill Blair.

Officers document hundreds of thousands of mostly non-criminal encounters with citizens each year. They stop and question people and fill out personal details on “field information reports.” The information cards become part of a massive database used for investigative purposes.

Over the past several years, zone 121 has been the most heavily carded area in the city, according to a Star analysis of police contact cards data obtained in a freedom of information request.

Those interactions have triggered a negative response from many of the youth who were targeted, including teenagers in a training course who went outside for a cigarette break.

“There were a lot of young people who felt there was an abuse of power from the police towards them in terms of the questioning,” says Shadya Yasin of the York Youth Coalition, a group of 18 agencies that work together to provide service coordination for youth programs in Mt. Dennis.

“Until today, there are still a lot of young people who feel questioned.”

Two youth workers interviewed by the Star recalled a day last year when they were walking along Jane St. and saw that TAVIS officers had pulled over four different motorists in a span of two blocks.

“Unfortunately they were all young and black,” says one of the workers. “That was a shocking experience for me because I’ve never seen four different people in cars — not even two blocks apart — pulled over.”

Since July, the youth — who are from some of the city’s most at-risk communities, including Weston-Mt. Dennis — have received intensive mentoring from case workers who have taught them about anger management, life skills, leadership training, even food literacy.

All of them were chosen because they were involved in gangs or lived in a neighbourhood where there were strong odds they might join one.

But “it’s not like the Crips and Blood gangs sensationalized in the U.S.” says Zola Jeffers, a hard-nosed case worker who mentored youth in the Weston-Mt. Dennis branch of the program. “Here it’s about survival and poverty. It’s about putting food on the table.”

The gym is decorated for the occasion with tables covered in black cloths and dotted with black, gold and white balloons. High up on the walls are the bright blue-and-white championship banners of the Hebrew school’s sports teams.

But for the youth sitting five rows deep, watching a gritty theatrical performance on mental health and teen sex before the ceremony, success will be judged in far less tangible terms.

“If I can get a young man to stop referring to women as ‘bitches,’ that’s success to me,” says Jeffers. “It’s really the intangibles that are important. People want to hear about jobs, universities. But we’re basically trying to undo 17 years of damage.”

In the hallway outside the gym, a graduate is standing on a red carpet which has been lined up in front of a white backdrop for photos.

The 19-year-old Mt. Dennis resident made it through PIT after quitting the first time. Case worker Arnold Jeyabalan has helped the Grade 10 dropout register for his high school equivalency test, get a new health card, and obtain his first photo identification card.

“I’m happy to have photo ID,” says the teen, who was last stopped by police in December for jaywalking (the new ID will make it easier for officers to fill out the document cards). “(The police) harass you until they know who you are.” ”

University of Toronto researchers are currently analyzing data from PIT, a three-year pilot project which has seen about 65 per cent of those enrolled stay with the program long enough to graduate. In all, more than 200 youth have benefitted from it.

Program manager Orville Wallace says many of the kids in conflict with the law don’t have support and are without a positive adult role model because of family breakdown. Many are parents themselves.

The teen with his new photo ID says he didn’t realize he’d need school to get a job until he joined PIT.

Wallace sees success if youth just stay with the program, but he says PIT has also resulted in less interaction with police and more lawful behaviours. “We’re trying to create a model of what a gang-prevention program looks like,” says Wallace.

The three-year program ends this March. “We’re very upset,” says Jeffers. “The community is upset.”

The hub, a coalition of United Way sponsored agencies, opened in 2009 on Jane St. around the corner from where Const. Todd Baylis was shot and killed by a drug dealer in 1994.

Derick Asante is a youth program manager with Yorktown Child and Family Centre, one of the agencies that operate out of the hub.

He says he often hears from teenagers who say, “Oh I can’t stand the police. I can’t stand this. There are no jobs for me.” But Asante says he encourages the conversations and hopes it will keep the kids coming through the door.

“When they come back the second time it’s more positive,” says Asante. “And that’s what I’m always trying to get out of them. That you can be in a terrible position but there’s always something to be hopeful about.”

The United Way building fills a critical need for Weston-Mt. Dennis, providing the first centralized social service programming in the area. Kids, youth and young parents can take courses as well as get access medical and dental care.

It’s also one of the only community buildings with meeting rooms and a kitchen. The lack of space in the neighbourhood is a constant lament of youth workers, who often find even local schools booked up when they try to use them for programming.

Weston-Mt. Dennis, says Heidi Serio, a community worker with Yorktown, “was a priority neighbourhood that was never a priority.

“If we take trips out to other communities where there’s a public pool that has a slide, (the kids are) in awe, they’re shocked by it,” says Serio, who runs community-based and school programs for youth aged 13 to 24.

The hub is well-used and on a recent weeknight, young parents with children flooded the building for a drop-in program that included food, circle time with staff, parents and children, and even cooking.

“Personally my wish list is that it was bigger,” says Asante.

But it’s law enforcement resources that have been on the rise.

“TAVIS comes, yes it’s helpful for a period of time, a month or two months, then they’re gone,” says Yasmin Haq-Khan, a community planner with Social Planning Toronto. Meanwhile, neighbourhood programs, she says, have been “decimated” by cuts.

Marion Newrick, executive director of Community Action Resource Centre on Keele St, says she is “highly frustrated because the police get everything they need, and I’m not anti-police in any shape or form.

“They get more and more and more, every year, and the community gets the crumbs.”

The York Youth Coalition organized the mid-February meeting to address youth issues such as crime, unemployment, recreational space and settlement services, the latter of which has lost a million dollars in funding. Rumblings of government cuts mean more money will soon leave the area.

About 20 community agency workers, including two from the Jane St. hub, as well as city employees fill the small second-floor boardroom of an old City of York building on Keele St.

YYC coordinator Shadya Yasin has brought everyone together with the goal of creating a “clear and open conversation between the three levels of government and the coalition members when it comes to youth issues and the front-line workers, and the importance of the work they are doing” as advocates.

First up, the end of the federally funded gang prevention program. Frank Markel, president and CEO of JVS Toronto, which runs it, is admittedly bewildered by the funding landscape when it comes to youth and justice program funding.

Markel says he heard a day before the meeting that a private donor may come forward to keep the gang-prevention program going, but he’s also interested in government funding. By the end of the meeting, he is better schooled on which government can offer what.

But what quickly becomes clear is that there will be no new money.

Sullivan notes that there’s a federal youth justice fund, but that the focus of the Conservative government in Ottawa is on “punishment rather than prevention.”

Markel vows to keep PIT going, somehow. A new federal funding cycle is on the way, but there will be a gap in the summer.

“As you know, all three levels of government are going through a very difficult phase right now,” says Nunziata. “Money is not going to be the solution.”

Any new services in the area will have to modelled on the Jane St. hub.

“I think that’s what we need to look at as a community,” says Nunziata. “We should be looking at partnerships and amalgamating them all into one space, providing even more services than you are because there will be more resources given to that.”

Already, many of the agencies in the room dominate local Archbishop Romero high schoolwhere they run programs, after hours.

Asante says it’s the only way they’ve been able to coordinate programming. “If you don’t have people coming together then it’s not going to happen. You’re not going to do it by yourself. We’re just trying to keep it moving and see. Because that’s where the hope is.”

Nunziata has secured a former city building — the Bartonville truck bay on a laneway between Eglinton Ave. and Jane St. — as the new home of UrbanArts.

The centre, which received funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, will offer youth programming and contain a dance studio, kitchen and garden.

The building will also house the ProTech Media Centre and will offer youth free access to technology and digital arts, including graphic and web design.

This summer, construction of a new, $30-million city recreation centre is expected to start at Keele St. and Eglinton Ave. W.

And the youth coalition wants to produce a small, pocket-sized resource for police that lists all of the neighbourhood agencies.

“Our members are asking that instead of police arresting these youth, give them a warning,” says coalition co-ordinator Shadya Yasin. “And so when they see a young person who is on the verge of going to the other side of the law, instead of arresting them, listen.

“And say, ‘Go talk to Jim, go talk to Amanda. Make sure you’re in that program for this amount of time and I’ll at least do a follow-up.’”

The police presence, for youth in the area, is constant. There are police in their buildings and in their high schools. On her way to the meeting, Yasin says she was waiting for a bus when police pulled up and called out to a young male beside her.

“ ‘Hey, come here. Where’s your I. D? Where are you going? Do you live here?’ ” she says the police asked.

“It’s pretty sad to see what’s happening here. There are a lot of people who are working to change things but this is something that is still continuing.”

The latter is a tough topic, given that the youth workers have had negative personal experiences with police. The kids in the club are young but they, too, have negative views of police, based on what they’ve seen and what older siblings have experienced.

A young boy in the room, on the cusp of puberty, says he hasn’t personally had a bad experience with police. It will come, says Chris Blackwood, 30, a program co-ordinator for the club, who grew up in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood.

“They’ll catch him at the basketball court. See what he’s up to. See what he has. I think it happens to all young black males, in regards to police. We’re in a priority neighbourhood. We’re always in the wrong place.”

“I think they’re very unaware of the impacts that they may have, coming into these neighbourhoods, where you have normal people and normal children,” says Hiba Wais, 26, a youth worker with the club and a youth and tenant representative in her home neighbourhood of Jamestown.

Officers come in “cocky, arrogant,” continues Wais. “Like it doesn’t matter. There are other people who live within the neighbourhood that are not criminals. The majority of them that work in TAVIS, I would say, the ones that work in these high priority neighbourhoods, they have no sensitivity training.”

Rayon Brown, director of the club, says that in the first month of working at there he was pulled over seven times, including being confronted by TAVIS officers on three occasions while walking to his car, right outside 121 Humber.

“I have nothing good to say about the police,” says Brown, 32, who has a teaching degree, has worked in the neighbourhood for four years and grew up in Rexdale.

“Whatever it is that causes them to conduct themselves this way in the community, it’s terrible. They automatically assume we’re drug dealers and killers and treat us accordingly. My job is to say, ‘Guys, give the police a chance and obey the law,’ but how can I say that when I’m being treated the same way they’re being treated?

“If we focus more on fixing poverty, I’m sure the crime rate will go down,” Brown says. “It’s less about policing and more about addressing certain issues in the community that really affect them.”

He believes investing in youth is fine, but more must be done to help parents. “We have to create more opportunities for these people without spoon-feeding them. You teach them how to fish, they fish for life.”

Back in the TV room, a young girl who had been silent says she has something to say.

“I don’t think police are doing a good job,” she says, clutching a pillow to her chest. “Because my brother died four years ago and. . . ”

She pauses, and all chatter in the room stops.

“They never found his killer yet. His killer is still on the road. He’s probably still like enjoying his life right now, and that’s all I wanted to say.”

And then she cries.

Saunders and his predecessor, Tom Russell, who ran 12 Division for a year before being promoted late last year, recognize there is always room for improvement but say much is being done to improve relationships with youth.

“I get it when you’re talking about toxic,” says Saunders. “But I’m getting phone calls from people who are very excited. They’re going, ‘Great, when are you coming out into the community?’ ”

The two senior officers seemed shocked to hear what youth and youth workers interviewed by the Star were saying about their perceptions of police and relationship, and don’t believe it speaks for the majority. But they were concerned.

“Any viewpoint with youth that is negative towards police is concerning, no matter where you work within the city of Toronto,” says Russell. “So, we’re always looking for opportunities to work with youth, to listen to youth . . .”

To that end, the division is developing a youth liaison committee. And 12 Division officers have initiated — on their own — a number of recreation programs, including cooking, camera clubs and sporting activities.

“I can show you hundreds of youth involved in programs that police have been involved in that will tell you that they had a tremendous experience and didn’t know that police were human,” says Russell.

“There’s a small portion of people we’re going to run into that just do not like us. We get that. It’s part of the business. But we certainly do everything we possibly can to show a positive side to policing.”

In a TAVIS initiative last summer in patrol zone 121, Russell put his own officers out on the streets on foot and bicycles and borrowed officers from other divisions in cruisers in the hope 12 Division police would forge better relationships with the community.

His officers still stopped, questioned and documented people, but the hope was that the interactions were less tense.

“It’s a community that’s facing all sorts of difficult social issues, there’s no doubt about that,” says Russell. “It’s also a community that’s faced some real crimes of violence.”

But, he adds, “there’s a committed and engaged community here. It’s not all a doom and gloom story.”

Is there anything else he’d like to tell people about 12 Division?

Russell thinks for a moment.

“How about, crime is down.”