RSS FeedGuns, Gangs and Toronto Community Housing
From my blog, Simon Says. Category: Police and Law News.
From the CBC: Toronto police raids snare 71 gang suspects
Project Corral was a Toronto Police investigation involving a number of other services, which focused on two gangs, the Falstaff Crips and the Five Points Generals, as well as the Shower Posse, a Jamaican organized crime syndicate who was supplying both gangs with guns and drugs.
Chief Blair is very proud of himself for the success of this project, as well he should be considering that, in addition to 71 arrests, police seized 10 firearms, $30,000 in cash, $10,500 in casino cheques, cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, hashish oil and vehicles. This is no small feat and no doubt many lives have been saved.
Most of these gang members lived and operated within the communities of Toronto Community Housing and in the aftermath of Project Corral there will either be a deadly resurgence of these gangs, as they try to reestablish themselves in these communities, or there will be a power struggle to fill the void. Either way this is not good for the officers of Toronto Community Housing!
TCH is comprised of some of the worst government subsidized housing projects in Toronto and is patrolled by unarmed special constables, provincial offences officers and parking enforcement officers! These officers operate as first responders in these communities, assisted by Toronto Police when necessary.
The problem is, Toronto Community Housing officers are significantly under equipped to deal with the situations they are put in. They are often first on scene to calls involving guns, gangs, drugs, assaults, domestic violence, suicides, and shootings. They respond to the same calls that Toronto Police officers do, but they don’t carry a firearm? Mr. Blair, give your head a shake and wake up before one of these officers doesn’t get to go home to his wife and children at the end of the day!
My friend who works for TCH once encountered a drug dealer on a call in an apartment complex. The drug dealer sicked his pit bull on the officers and, in order to save his own life, my friend was forced to kill it with baton strikes to the head. But apparently he doesn’t need to be armed.
Another officer I know in TCH responded to a call that was an hour old for suspicious activity in an apartment complex laundry room, where he had little to no radio reception. When he entered the laundry room he observed two males with marijuana and scales in plain view. He moved in to make an arrest and the males fled. He caught one of them and while patting him down he felt the butt of a pistol sticking out of the back of the his waistband. As soon as he touched it the fight for his life was on. He was eventually able to wrestle the gun away from him and call for help but the male escaped. The pistol was a 9mm semi auto with a do-rag wrapped around the ejection port to catch the spent casings. I guess this officer didn’t need to be armed either.
I can pretty much guarantee that every crazy thing you’ve heard about Toronto has been dealt with by a Toronto Community Housing officer at one point or another. They have a very difficult job to do I sincerely hope, for the sake of these officers and their families, that Mr. Blair and the Toronto Police get a reality check soon and arm them!
Passwords are the new guns
Your password is a gun. It can’t shoot but at least the government treats it like a gun. In the UK, they made it a crime to refuse to give up your password to the government. The US long considered encryption an armament. It means encryption has military uses like weapons, infra-red goggles, plutonium, and armoured cars. When the government forces you to give up your password, it can read your data. Then you can’t hide anything from the government. It can get what it wants by demanding your password. In the UK, you can go to prison for years if you say no. In this information age, there is a real public interest in giving the government electronic investigation powers. But the UK is doing it the wrong way. They breach your right not only to privacy but also to due process. If gun rights didn’t sound so silly today, I would call the encryption rights the new gun rights.
The UK government recently disclosed that two people had been convicted for refusing to give up their encryption keys. There is no word on the sentence, but the prison term for this offence can stretch to five years. The UK government has had a power to take passwords by force since October 2007. This is how it works. If the government believes it needs your password for national security, crime prevention, or for economic well-being of the UK, it can give you a section 49 notice, named after the authorizing section of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. A permission of the court is not necessary for this notice. You have only “reasonable” time to comply. After that, prosecutors can charge you with a criminal offence if you “knowingly” fail to give up the password.
Don’t say you have nothing to hide because you didn’t do anything wrong. There is a good reason to hide anything you want and still be a good citizen. Governments consist of people, even democratic governments. No matter how much you feel your government represents you, there are two ways in which a government can go rogue. First, you stop being in the majority. Second, a government official figures the majority won’t notice or will forgive him for abusing only you. That’s why many modern democratic countries enshrine human rights in their constitutional law: the US, Canada, and the EU, for example. Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms lets you ask the courts for protection from rogue government officials no matter what the majority thinks. The Canadian Constitution is a curb on both the government and the will of the majority. It presumes that both of them can do bad things. No one is a saint.
There are two ways to protect yourself from the government’s or the majority’s abuse. One is the constitutional law. The other one is physical. Many, many years ago gun ownership was such a physical barrier to government abuse. In the 18th century, it was reasonable to think that if men had guns, the government would not abuse them for fear of an armed response. Today it doesn’t make sense, of course, because no armed band of neighbourhood dads will be a match for the modern state’s professional military machine. But things we want to protect with physical barriers from governments gone astray are different today. It’s not land, or crops, or not even our physical liberty or security (courts do a good job protecting those two from abuse, and if a day comes when they can’t, a higher being will be our only hope).
What we more and more often want to protect today is computer data. Our lives are online or on the hard drive. Emails, records of every website we go to, diaries, mad or creepy thoughts we share with the computer screen, political manifestos, ideas, inventions, art: it’s really anything that can change the world in a perfectly legal way but an official may want to censor, delete or use in some other way to harass you, charge you, or declare that you don’t look like your passport picture when you go abroad. Do we live in a dictatorship? Of course not. Does our government do things like that routinely? No, no, and no. Does it looks like it wants to? Not really. But like the Charter presumes that the government has the capacity for evil, every citizen must have a right to presume the same thing and to build impenetrable walls around his private life. Gun lovers in a certain country south of the border got a wrong target in their sights. They cling to the wrong tools. Guns are outdated, good-for-nothing protection of human rights. Passwords are the new guns.
The UK law wants to take your passwords from you. And like many things in the computer age, passwords are tricky. You can’t rip them from the owner’s arms and break them into pieces. You can’t even know for sure who has them or who the owner of the data they protect is. That’s a huge problem with the UK law. To overcome this problem, the law must make presumptions. First, it must presume that whoever has the hardware, owns the data on it. Unfair. Plug your computer and lots of stuff will land on your hard drive in the first five minutes without your knowledge. Second, the law must assume that whoever has the encrypted data, knows the password. Don’t ever forget passwords that the government wants. It’s may be a criminal offence in the UK. Finally and most scarily, the law must presume that every chunk of random data is encrypted. Without a password, there is no way to tell an encrypted Word document from a piece of an image file. Encryption works by making ordered data appear random. Sadly, much legitimate, unencrypted data on your hard drive looks exactly like that. Experts can even encrypt text by turning it into a jpeg of a cat.
There is a very thin line between enforcing the UK password law and letting cops wade through arbitrary computers under the cover of the today’s hottest flavour of the public interest. There are just too many legal fictions in this criminal offence. For this reason, I think Canadian courts would not let it stand if our Parliament passed a similar law. It’s just not necessary to force people to give up passwords to defend the absolutely legitimate public interest of safety or national security. The government can do its job without breaching human rights this much. Forcing people to surrender passwords will not minimally impair their Charter rights. The offence in the UK law is also too vague because any file with random data is potentially encrypted and subject to investigation. Giving up passwords may also be self-incriminating. No one should be punished for refusing to testify against themselves.
Let’s not kid ourselves. More and more criminals will encrypt the data used to commit crimes. But the way computer networks work makes it easy for that data to end up on an ordinary citizen’s computer. The government shouldn’t have powers to force us to give up passwords to any random heap of data that it believes to be connected to criminal activity. Passwords to our email or computer accounts will not be safe from such investigations either. Spammers bombard our computers with billions of attachments every year. There is a good chance spammers’ networks or computers are implicated in crime. That’s a real connection to our pretty Macs or drab PCs humming in our living rooms or bedrooms. And little can stop the police from suspecting that you know the password. This scenario doesn’t have to be common to cause alarm. It should cause alarm because of its potential for abuse. Making it an offence to refuse to give passwords justifies police involvement that can go beyond reasonable limits. That’s too much for our civil liberties, even in the name of fighting crime.
The UK password law is harsh and unreasonable. It can make too many law-abiding citizens targets of police interest. It will make them potential criminals when they refuse to take down barriers between their private space and the government. Someone said we increasingly lived online. If we take our affairs to the electronic realms, let’s make sure we take our civil liberties there too, even if we have nothing to hide.
A Guide To Investing In Recession
In January 2008, I began investing in the stock market.
I was asked to by my good friend – and fellow LawIsCool contributor – Lawrence Gridin, and I just couldn’t say no.
Except for ECON101 and a couple of books by Sachs and Krugman, I have no education in economics or finance. I understand the principles of supply and demand, elasticity, inflation, and comparative advantage. With enough effort, I can summon and apply these principles to elementary models involving apples and small integers.
But when it comes to the stock market, I tend to gravitate to those anecdotes of dart-throwing monkeys outperforming experienced stockbrokers.
In addition to my lack of training, I am not a gambling man.
I went to a casino for the first time a few months ago. In one night I lost $10 on a 5¢ slot machine. I still rue my loss to that noisy one-armed bandit.
At the time Lawrence asked me to begin investing, I had been following the sub-prime mortgage crisis closely. I am still fascinated by it.
The modern economy can express the folly of myopic greed so beautifully and measurably. A law student might even claim that it does more than reify our sins, but that it also dispenses justice, if it were not for the fact that not only the greedy now suffer.
Since January 2008, the stock market has plunged.
The S&P 500 is an index of the prices of five hundred large, publicly-traded companies in the United States. It is considered a bellwether for the American economy. It has fallen from 1468 points to a recent low of 682, or -54%.
So it was that at one of the worst times in history to invest in the stock market, I invested in the stock market.
Believe it or not, I have lost nothing.
More incredibly, ranked against 66,000 avid stock traders — the type who research, trade daily, and actually try to make money off it – I am in the 97th percentile. I beat virtually all of them. What have I gained? Since all that Lawrence asked me to invest was a bit of my time on a popular stock prediction website, I have gained nothing but a better view of the American consumer.
How did I, an uninformed novice, beat the vast majority of enthusiast traders in one of the worst markets ever? I focused on what I did know about the American economy and consumer.
I knew enough about the sub-prime mortgage crisis that it would probably infect the broader credit market. I knew that this would deepen the already existing recession by decreasing consumer spending which, in turn, would generally lower demand in the economy. I thought to myself, what do American consumers nonetheless demand when times are tough, when they’re stressed and unemployed, when property crime is increasing, when their house is foreclosed, and when uncertain political change is fast approaching ?
Answer: guns, drugs, beer, and cigarettes.
So that’s exactly what I invested in. My picks included Sturm, Ruger & Company, Smith & Wesson Holding Corp, Johnson & Johnson, Molson Coors Brewing Company, Anheuser-Busch, Reynolds American, and Altria Group.
It turns out my sardonic hunch was dead on; these companies and their ilk have defied the recession and done incredibly well over the past year, as demand for their products surges.
Will I start investing real money in my hunches? Since my conscience prohibits me from lending money to gun and cigarette makers, I’ll have to wait for now…
You can sign up at The Motley Fool – Caps to view my performance and make your own predictions. My username is ilovetogamble.
“If you don’t follow the stock market, you are missing some amazing drama.”
- Mark Cuban, American billionaire
