Gunning for Change

What's up Cyberspace.

As some of you well know, gun violence has shot to the top of the crime agenda in Halifax. Three shootings in three days in a fairly well-to-do area of the city has all of the mass media and opinion leaders in the city up in arms.

Police chief Frank Beazley has released a message to the citizens of Halifax, which you can read here.

The chief starts his message by saying what a great job the police force has done since 2005, citing the fact that overall crime statistics have gone down every year except 2010. Of course he fails to mention that Halifax has the highest unsolved murder rate in Canada...and I have a sneaking suspicion that Corey Duane Lucas (who was shot and died over the weekend) will be the next to fall under that category.

Good ol' Frank then moves on to say that although crime is going down, there is more violence in our community and it is ever-growing. Not only that, but he says that most of the people involved in this type of crime are known to each other. Call me crazy, but if it's the same people over and over and people known to these repeat offenders...should we maybe put some of them under surveillance? Just a thought. He then goes on to say "As we’ve seen the violence and the shootings increase in our community, we’ve stayed the course with our Crime Reduction Strategy..." Good idea Frank. Why not just say what you mean - we're going to continue doing things that way we have, even though it's not working. Genius.


As the chief continues to illustrate his points, he mentions the Guns and Gangs unit. I did a little bit of research on the Guns and Gangs unit...as of March 5 2012 they had taken 60 guns off the street. They claim to monitor six-eight gangs in the HRM...but some of these supposed gangs have only four members...and some of the members are as young as fifteen. Hmmmm....something seems amiss. You can read the Chronicle Herald article about the Guns and Gangs team (published March 5 2012) here.

As opposed to going through the rest of Frank's message, I'm just going to make my point. The police chief has failed again to hit near the mark - the root of the violence lies in the state of the economy. When push comes to shove, most of us would do whatever it is that we have to do to survive - to provide for ourselves and our families. This message from Frank Beazley seems like some very poorly orchestrated PR and reminds me of Mike Savage's recent CTV interview in which he stated "We need both short-term and long-term solutions..." and offered an example of neither. You can see it here.

I guess this just reminded me of the state of our society. Our leaders are out of touch with the real issues and spend most of their time trying to patch up their last faux pas. I don't really know how to fix it, but I can say this for sure...Halifax is ready for a new regime. Let's pay attention to the mayoral race.

Peace and Love
The Critical Stranger

As always thoughts, comments and suggestions are encouraged and appreciated!