Gangs in TO

M

meghan

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FEATURE-Code of silence enshrouds Toronto gun murders

By Amran Abocar

TORONTO (Reuters) - Segun Farquharson spent his last moments in a car with three other men, one of them a friend, frantically pleading with his killer and promising to obtain money to pay a debt.

"Just let me go get it for them, man. I swear to God, I'll pay for it out of my own pocket. I swear to God, man."

The pleas fell on deaf ears. A passenger told Farquharson "this ain't no negotiation," and someone shot and killed the 24-year-old man.

The chilling conversation was captured on Farquharson's cell phone voicemail and released by the police.

After almo
t three years, Farquharson's murder remains unsolved despite the taped conversation and the presence of witnesses. One witness, in the car when Segun was shot, claims not to remember the killer.


As g
un crimes escalate in Toronto -- nine of the city's 14 homicides as of late
March involved guns -- police are struggling to cope with a wall of silence.

After her son's murder, Julia Farquharson helped create United Mothers Opposing Violence Everywhere, bringing together mothers whose children died violent deaths. The mothers are mostly black, the murders mostly unsolved.

"They told me they know who it is," Farquharson said. "But they say they don't have any evidence to arrest him. People say to me 'Lady, how come the police have a tape of your son, they hear him begging for his life and they can't make an arrest?'"

Farquharson blames black youths' animosity toward the police.

"'If I die, I die. If I live, I live bu
t that's a chance I have to take,' that's the mentality that's on the street," she said. "We have to find a way to break that mentality."

HIGH NOON

Canadian
cities are t
raditionally far safer than their U.S. counterparts -- Toronto, Canada's largest city, had 65 murders last year while Chicago, comparable in size, had 599 homicides
in 2003. Yet the Toronto figure is up from 60 in both 2002 and 2001.

A rise in gang culture has made Toronto a more dangerous place in recent years, police say. To fight back, Toronto's mayor wants federal authorities to help stem the flood of weapons imported illegally from the United States.

But police want something much more basic -- cooperation from victims and witnesses.

At a crowded town hall meeting this month in Scarborough, the Toronto suburb where half this year's murders took place that is a predominantly immigrant area with many ethnic minorities, police chief Julian Fantino railed agains
t the lack of information.

Three men were killed and one injured in three separate shootings in eight hours in Scarborough this month, including a daylight shooting on a street corner.

"There's c
ertain elements that perpetuate that young people shouldn't talk to the police," Fantino said. "The most pressing issue we have today is getting these guns off the street."

Police blame the v
iolence on gangs fighting for control of the drug trade, and the silence on fear of retribution. The lack of witnesses has prompted the head of Toronto's homicide squad to call for a U.S.-style grand jury system that would compel witnesses to cooperate with investigators.

But one high-profile lawyer sees a more basic problem.

"The city that is proud of its diversity has a white police force," Clayton Ruby wrote in an article. "The unsolved murders are race-related gang killings and an overwhelmingly white police force, whose members live far from
the communities that have these problems, cannot get intelligence respecting them."

'BETTER A DEFENDANT THAN AN INFORMER'

Some in Toronto's black community say th
at explanation is too easy.
While racial profiling and police distrust is a factor, they say there is no excuse for keeping silent.

"The whole black community needs to come forward and say enough is enough. What is it going to take?" said tutor Stacy Brown. "You go to a crime sc
ene and all you have is a body. You have clues, yes, but you have no witnesses or anything. How can anything be solved?"

Witnesses are clearly afraid of reprisals if they come forward. But there is also what the mothers of UMOVE are calling a 'code of silence.'

"It's this attitude that 'We don't call police, we don't go to the police, we deal with stuff.' And they take care of this stuff themselves," said UMOVE co-founder Audette Shephard.

"I spoke to t
his young man who said 'Miss, I'd rather be a defendant than an informer.'"

Shephard's only child Justin, a promising basketball player, was shot and killed in 20
01. Despite a C$100,000 reward
put up by police and Justin's half-brother, New Orleans Hornets center Jamaal Magliore, no-one has come forward.

Shephard says she knows who was with her son the night he was murdered. She called police and urged them to talk to the person. But the youth hired a lawyer who informed detectives that his client would not be providi
ng any evidence.

"There are young men and women that have information that is crucial to the solving of these cases and they're just refusing to come forward," she said. "Sometimes solving these cases is just one phone call away. But they don't trust. They just don't trust."

And the witness who was with Segun Farquharson but can't remember who shot him still roams the neighborhood freely. Julia Farqu
harson says she sees him from time to time.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N16423265
.htm
 
Notice what the JEW has to say
.........
"The city that is proud of its diversity has a white police force," -- Clayton Ruby

This is what I say to JEW Clayton Ruby, -- if you don't like living with Whites, go live with your own kind in Israel. According to YOUR law you can go there right now and abuse and murder the Arabs.

Clayton the Lawyer is a parasite; I doubt that his own kind really want him around. Wouldn't it be awkwark if the Jew-only schools in Toronto had to accept a quota of 50% black negroes. I agree with their method of excluding all other races.
 
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