Ted Barris

When I attended public school in the village of Agincourt (now part of Scarborough) because it was nearly a rural school the playground was sizable. Still, during recess, the boys in my class had to find the tallest maple tree – just off school grounds – to climb. The principal realized if one of us were hurt, he’d be liable. So he declared the tree “off limits.” That didn’t stop us. One day, we were blithely enjoying the tree, when out strode Principal Kilpatrick in a rage. Everybody ran for cover… except me.

“Were you playing in that tree?” Kilpatrick asked me directly.

“Yes,” I said, because I couldn’t hide the fact.

“Who else was up there?” he stormed, demanding I tell him.

Having made the decision to face the music, I wasn’t about to stop there. I told him who else had climbed the tree. The principal made note of the names and we all got suitable punishment. (I think we lost recess privileges for a month or something.) In any case, I felt pretty badly that, in some pupils’ view, I had “ratted” on the others. Nevertheless, there were no repercussions, since my pals realized we were all in the wrong. We fessed up to our misdemeanour and took our lumps.

The lesson that really didn’t register on me at the time was that my parents had probably ingrained in me an important rule that came to the surface in my moment of decision.

“If you are part of or witness to something wrong, say something.”

I’ve been thinking about that occasion in recent days in connection with vandalism in this community and the gun violence in Toronto. I’ve been wondering, what has brought about the change in our culture that drives people away from reporting this stuff? Why would anybody spotting a crime – whether minor or major – not wish to own up to it and ensure that the guilty are punished? I recognize that in the case of gang-type shootings in the city, there is fear of retaliation. But since when did not ratting rise to become a higher code of honour than doing the honourable thing by providing witness testimony?

In the case of the Toronto gun play, the past couple of decades have witnessed what seems an endless string of senseless deaths. Last weekend, there was the exchange of gunfire in the Yorkdale Mall parking area. Last July, a 14-year-old and a 23-year-old were killed and two dozen wounded when caught in the crossfire of a gunfight during a community barbecue on Danzig Street in Scarborough. The previous month two died during a shootout inside the Eaton Centre food court. Back in 2005, on Boxing Day, bystander Jane Creba, 15, was killed in a gang gunfight on Yonge Street.

And perhaps the one case that seemed to be a watershed for all this gun crime, in 1994, Georgina Leimonis, 23, was innocently shot and killed in a robbery at a downtown café called Just Desserts. In a couple of those cases perpetrators were charged and found guilty. But the most recent three – Yorkdale, Danzig and Eaton Centre – remain substantially unsolved crimes. How is that possible when scores, maybe hundreds, of people saw and heard those shootings?

Quite simply fear has changed proud citizens into anonymous persons. Panic that they might be recognized by the shooters or considered sympathetic to the victims, sends them running away, instead of running to the authorities. Reluctance to get involved has made many look the other way. They’re responding to the animal – not the intelligence – in our nature. They’ve fallen victim to what social psychologists call the bystander effect or “Genovese syndrome.”

At about 3 a.m. on March 13, 1964, 28-year-old bar manager, Catherine (Kitty) Genovese, parked her car about a hundred feet from her apartment in New York City. A stranger approached her and when she ran he overtook her. He then stabbed her, robbed her and raped her in an attack that lasted half an hour. It was reported by the New York Times, that Genovese’s cries for help were heard by dozens of people in the apartment. Some even witnessed the attacker jump into his car and drive away. But the assault wasn’t reported for more than an hour. Catherine Genovese died en route to hospital. The perpetrator was only caught because police arrested him during a house burglary a week later and eventually connected him to the murder.

I don’t think anybody in Toronto or such neighbouring communities as ours, believes that citizens in the GTA have fallen to such low levels of citizen responsibility as New York in 1964. But one wonders when the federal government’s response to gun crime is to build more jails and the Toronto mayor’s response is to blame do-gooders for being soft on criminals.

It’s time witnesses were part of the solution, not party to the problem.