Results tagged “crime”

As the Toronto Police Service prepares to expand CCTV coverage in the GTA, this security camera footage of a BMW SUV going alpha-dog on top of someone's hatchback, recorded last Thursday at an Extreme Fitness parking lot in Thornhill, has made us realize a few things:

University College has long been one of Toronto's most admired buildings. Its Gothic Revival style, inspired in part by the Romantic poets, impressed such distinguished nineteenth-century visitors as Anthony Trollope, Governor General Lord Dufferin, and Oscar Wilde. In Landmarks of Toronto (1893), John Ross Robertson called the University of Toronto building "the crowning architectural glory of Toronto." Perhaps befitting its moody architecture, University College is also home to one of the city's best-known ghost stories. Versions of the story differ, but each follows the same basic plot.

What was advertised as a civic rally looked more like a mid-afternoon coffee break. On October 19, friends, colleagues, and supporters of Darcy Allan Sheppard—the cyclist who died after an altercation on August 31 with former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant—mingled on the lower steps of Old City Hall at 2:30 p.m. with their coffee mugs and lunch boxes, but did little else.

The Toronto Police Service issued a press release this afternoon alerting the public to "increased theft of baby strollers," to the tune of six incidents in the past ten months, in the vicinity of 11 Divison, located near the intersection of Dundas and Keele streets. Apparently, these dastardly stroller thieves have been fencing their haul online. Constable Wendy Drummond writes, in the release [PDF], that police have already arrested and charged a man and a woman, who were caught hawking purloined prams on the web. There is no mention of twirly mustaches or throaty cackling, but we assume these details were left out for brevity. The police are advising area residents to write down the serial numbers of their strollers and store them out of sight, to which we add: maybe forego the deluxe model.

On Saturday morning, David Dewees killed himself. On October 1, two days before, Toronto Police had charged the Jarvis Collegiate teacher with two counts of invitation to sexual touching and two counts of luring. The police allege that "between July 2008 and July 2009, [Dewees] befriended two boys while working at the Ontario Pioneer Camp in Port Sydney, Ontario," and that "he had inappropriate contact with them over the Internet." (The photo at right, and those charges, are from the police press release.) As is often the case, the accusation made the news, including the Star, which misreported that Dewees was charged with sexual assault of the two boys.

Cameraphones aren't just for snapping incriminating photos that unwittingly end up on the internet anymore! Oh, wait—we guess this still applies: at 2:10 on Friday afternoon in front of 110 Spadina Avenue, this man was witnessed allegedly stealing the rear wheel of a bicycle belonging to Torontoist reader Dean Perlmutter. According to the witness, when the man was asked if he was stealing the wheel that he just removed, he allegedly threatened the witness and rode off. Perlmutter continues:

What were the ingredients needed to produce a Labour Day weekend in Toronto eighty years ago? A visit to the CNE? Check. Tourists crowding local highways? Check. A day at a beach? Check. Union members proudly marching in a parade wearing white suits and straw hats? Check. Controversy in the sporting world? Check. Rumours of a provincial election in the offing? Check. Economic worries? Not yet (wait a few weeks). Thieves with a penchant for stealing trousers? Check...?!?

Late on Tuesday afternoon, cyclists took to the stretch of Bloor Street West between Avenue Road and Bay Street (above), an impromptu mourning of Darcy Allan Sheppard, the bike courier killed along the stretch the night before. A much larger pack is expected to descend on the area on Wednesday at 5 p.m. to do it again. For a community whose more enthusiastic members took over the Gardiner on a whim last year, that stretch of Bloor should be an easy temporary conquest; activists have long wanted bike lanes there, going so far as to create the lanes there themselves.

Toronto Police have just announced [PDF] that they have formally charged former Ontario Attorney General (and new Invest Toronto head) Michael Bryant with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death, charges directly related to the horrific death of a cyclist—identified by CTV as bike courier Darcy Allan Sheppard—last night. Bryant will appear in court at Old City Hall on October 19; police, meanwhile, continue to solicit witnesses or tips to police (416-808-1900) or Crime Stoppers (416-222-TIPS).

Normally, things like Hummers and overdeveloped triceps are indictors of a diminutive manhood, but a Parkdale resident has widened the figurative condition to include this dastardly delinquent, who allegedly has a potty predilection for apartment building lobbies.

The city workers' strike has been a hardship, for sure. Toronto's parks are starting to look like garbage barges run aground, non-union city employees and private citizens alike are dirtying their hands and straining their muscles to keep our streets somewhat presentable, and the striking workers themselves have had to go all this time without drawing their usual paycheques. But brilliant coping strategies have a way of flourishing in times like these, like fruit flies on discarded banana peels. There is probably no better example of this than our new friend Todd. (Not his real name; a nom de grime.)

Yesterday, the Toronto Police arrested one Aretha Wilson under a U.S. extradition warrant for the charge of Assault with a Deadly Weapon [PDF]. What makes this particularly notable is that the person she assaulted was actor Leonardo DiCaprio, allegedly slashing his ear and neck with a beer bottle at a Los Angeles party four years ago, for which DiCaprio reportedly received seventeen stitches. While Wilson was on the lam in Toronto, she was also the subject of a country-wide warrant following a 2006 Super Bowl party, where police allege she slashed a man with a beer glass—and the man would die moments later in a fall from his eighth floor balcony, either by accident or by his own hand. Drama! To any Hollywood studios looking for their next television franchise, may we suggest Fugitive Squad: Toronto Unit?

"I was assaulted by Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas and his security guards. I am bleeding. Please, I need to file a police report. No joke."

Of the pantheon of hip-hop gods, many consider Larry Parker the All-father. And like any god worth his salt ‘n’ pepa, he goes by many names: Kris Parker, The Teacher, The Blastmaster, The Philosopher, and, mostly, KRS-ONE.

Remember Igor Kenk? He's many things to many people. The world’s most prolific (suspected) bike thief? Check. Alleged drug trafficker? Affirmative. Raging hothead? Yup. Stellar recycler? Sure, that too. But movie star? Now there’s a new one.

In the heady 1920s, Ontario was a dry province. After the war, the Ontario Temperance Act, which originally prohibited public consumption and sale of alcohol as a wartime measure, had been strengthened to close a variety of loopholes to become outright prohibition. It was, of course, a widely flouted law that gave rise to an underground economy of thriving bootleggers who supplied beer and whisky to blind pigs and speakeasies—as well as to Americans suffering through the decade-long thirst of the Volstead Act south of the border. Rocco Perri, an Italian immigrant to Hamilton, was one of many once-small-time crooks who were emboldened and enriched by the smuggling trade.

       

Misinformation travels mighty fast these days. So when major news organizations around the city reported earlier today that there was word of one—or several—people with a gun in the Bickford Centre, a continuing education school on Bloor at Christie, and that police had swarmed the area, it was hard to separate what was really going on from what was alleged to be happening behind the building's walls.

Last night, according to the Star, two men, wearing Halloween masks, strolled into an adult video store on the Queensway (possibly Cinema X Adult Video), pepper-sprayed an employee (female) and a customer (male), left a backpack full of lit fireworks in the store, and, as the fireworks exploded and the store burned, "ran away giggling." This actually happened.

Torontoist Flickr pool member designwallah snapped this photo of an adorable bunny in distress.

One of the largest concerns about Google Street View, a concern echoed here now that the search giant continues to collect the photos they need to roll out a comprehensive street-level map of our city, is privacy. What if Google catches you with someone you don't want people to know you were with? What if Google catches you coming out of somewhere you don't want people to know you were inside? Or what if Google catches you in one of your lesser moments: throwing up at the side of the road, say, or, God forbid, appearing to break the law, your image preserved online for all eternity? Sure, faces and licence plates will get automatically blurred out, but that feature has proven a bit dodgy, and someone's face and licence plate aren't the only way to identify them.

Toronto residents, take heart: crime in your city is less severe than you have been led to believe. That's the word from Statistics Canada, which yesterday released the first edition of the Police-Reported Crime Severity Index, a new ranking created at the request of the police community that takes into account both the volume and seriousness of criminal acts. According to the index, police-reported crime across Canada declined in severity between 1998 and 2007, the last year for which data is available. The index also pegs Toronto as the metropolitan area with the lowest crime severity, well below the national average and that of other major cities such as Montreal and Vancouver.

If you’re stopping by Dundas Station while riding the rocket anytime soon, you might mistakenly think you’re pulling into Compton. A series of posters lined along the platform walls—that look like stop-motion animation from the subway cars as you pull into or out of the station—strangely resemble plate-glass windows with bullet holes punched through them. Is it a plug for 50 Cent’s new album? Good guess, but not quite.

The battle of the Baracks on the Danforth is over.

With the two-hour series finale of the epic, bar-raising reboot of Battlestar Galactica airing this Friday, what could be better than checking it out in high definition on the silver screen, surrounded by a dedicated audience of T.O.'s geek elite? Or better yet, doing so while contributing a little something to a good cause, fully secure in your anything-but-Cylon humanity?

There's trouble on a desolate stretch of the Danforth, and, like everything else that has ever gone wrong in the entire universe, it's all Barack Obama's fault.

The last time we saw a cyclist's note to her neighbours, it was all love, happiness, and kittens. But hope in humanity is so two years ago.

In a spun-out economy like ours, the idea of black market poultry shouldn't be that surprising. And yet, with news like the following from the Toronto Police Service, the mental image of a Trailer Park Boys-style chicken heist is enough to merit an early morning spit-take.

Here's something awful about us: when we learned last year that the TTC's latest "Marketing Communications Plan" [PDF] would include an education campaign around "Operator Assault," we got a little giddy; how would the TTC's infamously ditzy marketing department choose to frame this serious issue? "The assault goblins didn't do this ...people did!"?

It wasn't long after Adenir DeOliveira, 47, (allegedly) pushed two teenage boys onto the Dufferin subway tracks last Friday when Toronto’s local media began whipping up public support for barriers on TTC subway platforms. CBCnews.ca wrote that the incident “spurr[ed] calls for the devices” without providing any attributive quotes. The Star felt it necessary to add the line “despite two frightening incidents in the past month” after reporting that TTC chairman Gary Webster believes Toronto’s subway stations are still safe. CityNews.ca chimed in as well, writing that Friday’s near-tragedy “has led to renewed calls for safety barriers in the subway” (the "renewed calls" being remarks made by city councilor Joe Mihevc and ordinary commuter Tony Wakelin).

While the TTC's e-Alerts have been around for just over a week now, the message just sent out to subscribers (above) marks only the second time that the system has alerted riders when something is back up rather than just when something is down (after all the blackout chaos, we e-mailed Adam Giambrone earlier this week and told him that we thought the mostly missing feature was an important one). Why are trains still skipping Osgoode? Well, there's this thing: as surveillance cameras watched, a 19-year-old man was shot at the station just before 10:45 a.m. this morning, and he is now at the hospital in serious condition with non-life-threatening injuries. CityNews says that they have "exclusive video captured just moments after the shooting took place," to be aired at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. tonight, and if the channel's coverage of rats in restaurants is any indication, it will totally not be sensationalized or blown out of proportion at all.