news
2010 Hero: Taking Things into Our Own Hands
Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.
Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains—Toronto’s very best and very worst people, places, and things over the past twelve months. From December 13–17: the Villains! From December 20–24, the Heroes! And, from December 27–30, you can vote for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.
Holy vigilante, Batman! This year, Torontonians were seized by that special blend of a righteous sense of justice and a do-it-yourself spirit that leads to casting authority’s ineffectual efforts aside and going it alone—and where the authorities failed, Toronto’s lay citizens stepped up. So go ahead and colour us controversial: we’re going to say that the Torontonians who took things into their own hands earned Hero status in 2010.
First up, we have Roger Reis, the Bank of Montreal employee whose gentle tackling skills caught our eye during the G20 as he politely but efficiently stopped someone from looting a Bell store, admonished the would-be thief against stealing, and sent him on his way. While Reis has Torontoist Hero laurels all his own, we want to take a moment here to applaud the action as well as the man: with the long arm of the law inexplicably absent, Reis tackled the issue himself.
Though the take-down was less gentle, we’re also going to point here to David Chen, the Chinatown grocer who took it upon himself to make a citizen’s arrest of Anthony Bennett, a career thief who stole $60 worth of plants from Mr. Chen’s Lucky Moose Food Mart. After tying Bennett up and putting him in a truck to await police, Chen found the tables turned when he was charged with assault because his citizen’s arrest had missed its moment, occurring an hour after Bennett’s crime. Chen and other small grocers in the area deal regularly with petty theft, a scourge that makes a dent in their modest livings. As Chen’s case went to trial this fall, he became a symbol for the working everyman whose plight goes unheard by the authorities. In his ruling acquitting Chen of his crime, Justice Ramez Khawly concluded that “David Chen tried to fill the void where the justice system failed.” Hear, hear.
In our last example of praise-worthy DIY justice, this summer, when a group of holy rollers started up a prayer sesh outside the home of a gay couple in Leslieville, the couple’s neighbours intervened. Though churchgoers from Highfield Road Gospel Hall deny the incident was motivated by homophobia, residents of the street called foul on that, claiming that the group’s regular, targeted sermons, delivered at a full-volume shout, had already caused a lesbian couple to move away from the area. The video of the altercation had us cheering for the residents of Dundas and Greenwood as they stand up for their fellow neighbours and politely but firmly tell the unsolicited congregation to go the hell away.
We didn’t want to nominate these vigilantes for Hero, Toronto. We wish it wasn’t so. But when the powers-that-be stop doing anything productive with their own damn hands, a city’s gotta do what a city’s gotta do.