Scot Wortley has been researching the intersection of race, justice, and the root causes of violent crime since the 1990s. He contributed to 2008’s landmark report to the Ontario government in response to 2005’s “summer of the gun,” where a pair of high-profile shootings put the spotlight on public safety. Speaking with TVO Today last week, Wortley says that in some ways, the public understanding — and the position of governments — hasn’t changed in the nearly 20 years since that report.
“Do I think anything has changed? No. Do I think the recommendations that came from that document have changed? I don’t,” Wortley, a professor with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology and Sociological Studies, told TVO Today. “If anything I think we should be concerned that some of the social indicators of crime and crime causation are actually becoming worse over the last 30 years.”
Wortley points to increasing income and wealth inequality, a shrinking middle class, and higher rates of poverty as all increasing the probability of crime in Ontario communities. In particular, he worries that younger racialized people have “lost their stake” in the Canadian mainstream and have been alienated from society.
While there was a rise in crime after COVID-19, Wortley notes that some of the recent forms of crime we’ve seen may have surprising causes, at least in part.
“There’s other things that have happened that might create different types of violence, different types of crime, including the legalization of marijuana,” Wortley says. “We saw a little bit of a shift from the distribution and sale of cannabis illegally as that part of their market dried up, we saw a shift to things like car theft, home invasions, and the sale of different drugs — not to mention we saw some groups move from cities like Toronto to northern communities.”
That change in the types of crimes — and the media’s role in reporting them — may explain the widespread perception that crime (or more vaguely, “disorder”) has increased in recent years. Regardless of its cause, the pressure from the public has culminated in federal changes to bail conditions and, in Ontario, an attempt to do the same with provincial law that the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has challenged as unconstitutional.
It’s also true that high-profile shootings in public places — for example, at a street festival on St. Clair Avenue West this past August — have once again raised the salience of gun crime both in Toronto and in the rest of the province. It’s frustrating for evidence-based observers that the headline-grabbing events are contradicted by statistics showing that Toronto is by and large safer than it’s been in decades, and safer than many other parts of Canada: Toronto’s crime severity index, as measured by Statistics Canada, shows many other communities across the country with a greater population-adjusted prevalence of crime than the largest city.
“I’ll talk to people who say, ‘Well, I’m not afraid when I hear about a shooting at Jane and Finch because I never go to Jane and Finch,” Wortley says. “But when they hear about a shooting at a music festival or a mall, even if those events are exceedingly rare, those types of cases create a lot of public anxiety.”
Which isn’t to say that real victims of real crimes don’t deserve attention and sympathy. But too often the public policy response to a perceived increase in crime falls back on a punitive, law-and-order approach that can provide a short-term change without addressing the underlying causes of crime — precisely the situation that led to the 2008 Roots of Youth Violence report.
This process is visibly playing out today, as issues of crime and public safety are part of the debate in Toronto’s mayoral election. Councillor Brad Bradford, challenging incumbent Olivia Chow, has said that he would add 1,000 officers to Toronto Police Services, even larger than the current plan, adopted under Chow’s tenure, to increase the force by 720 officers.
Meanwhile, commitments to crime prevention measures receive relatively paltry sums. Toronto will spend $5 million for its primary youth crime prevention program this year, part of the broader $49 million community safety strategy. The Toronto Police operating budget is $1.4 billion for 2026.
Wortley doesn’t deny the need for policing, but argues that there’s a conflict between the short-term results a justice-heavy approach delivers and the policies that provide a more consistent longer-term safety for the community.
“If I hire more police officers, relatively soon they’ll be able to hold a press conference and they’ll show the proceeds of crime, they’ll put some drugs and guns on the table, and we’re going to feel safer as a result.”
“But many of the most effective crime prevention programs take years and years to bear fruit. Early childhood development programs have dramatic results on adolescent offenders, but they can take 10 to 14 years to show result,” Wortley says. “We have to ask ourselves, do we have a political system with the patience to make these investments in these types of programs and then wait for the results?”