There has been considerable discussion recently about restoring the death penalty. Overall, it would be a considerable mistake. However, a death penalty of sorts exists on the increasingly mean streets of Toronto and, in their own grisly fashions, executions continue to take place; but, now they are ad hoc, silent fear-inducing, and gang conducted. The ‘law’ of the streets has become, in Toronto as in most other major North American cities which Toronto has always tried to emulate, imitate, or eclipse, “If you talk or ‘snitch’ to the police you’re dead.”

Even the Premier has begun to take notice. On Valentine’s Day he mused about the growing and worrying prevalence of illegal handgun possession in Toronto. He told CBC Radio News: “It’s not..ahh..really all that good!”

A wimpy statement like this -- on top of a quivering core of disabling fear of saying anything vaguely politically-incorrect -- is hardly likely to “scare straight” potential shooters, yet it is much of a muchness coming from this lame, lying, lax, and limp-wristed premier. And Ontario’s courts are not proving reliable stalwarts in the battle to counter handgun violence either.

Ontario Superior Court Judge Anne Molloy concluded that sending a man to prison for three years in the case before her, even though he was found holding a loaded handgun, was unconstitutional.

The ‘victim’ of the police arrest was a 30- year-old, who was engaging in “adolescent preening”, handgun in hand, for a web-cam in his cousin’s apartment when Toronto police battered down the door and took him into custody. Personally, I could not conceive of sentencing him to three years, having read about the case, but I would certainly give him six months and inflict on him nightly viewings of his own webcast in silence -- minus its soundtrack -- as well as images of the faces of the 500+ people shot down in Toronto by handguns in the last 10 years. This carnage can no longer be treated as a game or any laughable -- or legally-justifiable -- occasion for preening.

One man who tried to work with Toronto police was Grenada-born “gentle giant” Kenneth Mark. He did his civic duty and said “No” to drugs, stood up to shooters, and refused to be intimidated by the street-gangs who would instill fear and an uneasy silence wherever they lurk. In doing so Mark, a shiftmanager at a Wal-Mart, signed his own death warrant under the “Rules” as they are played out on city streets -- where rule #1 is, if you are black, you don’t speak with, help, or in any way aid the police as a witness to crime(s).

Previously shot by gang members, as a warning, one supposes, Mark continued to provide police with valuable information, even going so far as to testify at a criminal trial of a known gang-member. For these ‘crimes’, he was ‘executed’ under the gang ‘law’ while walking along a Toronto street on his way to work, in December 2009. Christie Blatchford, covering this murder trial for National Post, called Mark “a lovely big lug” (Feb. 8). In one report she showed the murder weapon, found in the wall of the home of a 15-year-old (of course): it was a fearsomelooking illegal handgun with its attached silencer. “The man who hid the .22 in the air vent has since been convicted for possession of the gun. Like so many of (the accused shooter’s) circle, he is a young offender, his name protected by a publication ban.” With this handgun, Mr. Mark was silenced, and countless others received a renewed warning of the consequences of ever speaking to police. There have, of course, been many other times when proximate law and order have buckled and wilted in the face of sustained, serious, localized, and determined gang-type activity, and targeted violence. In a recent publication, The Death of King Arthur, by English writer Simon Armitage, there is a recounting -- a “thrilling account” according to a review in the International Express, of the Arthurian legend, taking place circa A.D. 500 in Britain. In those times, lawlessness was more common than not and knightly protection was both a necessity for survival and a fact of life if one wanted to survive. In brilliant verse updating of Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur”, Armitage gives a more macho, grisly and “grippingly gory account of grudge matches from days of yore” and splendid fresh “poetry (to the)

Arthurian gang fights.”

Lawlessness, it seems, always arises when the central

Ontario authority is perceived as broken Matters in places or too indecisive, too foreign, too remote, too disengaged, or too weak. Thus it is now perceived in many of Toronto’s interior periphery, black-dominated neighbourhoods. Money- and power-hungry gangs seek out voids and violently fill leadership vacuums to claim their “turf” in the drug wars now taking place. Blood-dimmed streets are the usual result these days. And, by and large, with heroic exceptions like Mr. Mark, black populations are cowed into silence by the threat of reprisals.

After each shooting police take to the airwaves to implore eye-witnesses to come forward. And usually, police shake their figurative heads in disbelief when few, or none, do. However, and this is why I chose “broken” in the Ontario context, it is the police themselves who are behaving more and more, with every passing year, like laws unto themselves and discreditably and -- most dishearteningly -- failing dishonourably to walk the walk that they talk up so winningly, so blithely.

Hundreds of times since its inception by the Ministry of the Attorney-General -- and Ontario’s Ombudsman, the outspoken, adamant Andre Marin, has been close to his boiling-over point about this -- the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) has had scores of uniformed officers refuse to comply with its requests for cooperation and information as it conducts its inquiries. Almost everyone involved with the SIU is a former police officer, or chief, who therefore are more than sympathetic to the difficulties inherent in policing, but still they are confronted by knots of silence, codes of silence, conspiracies of silence.

The police silence, part of their great unwritten “Code”, speaks volumes. And we all got to witness, further, the shamefully disgracing conduct of some six or eight uniformed police as they beat Adam Nobody during the lawful portion of the G-20 protests, on the lawn at Queen’s Park, no less. With their identity masked save one who grew hot under his visor with the work at hand, the police have kept mum. This file has been closed three times by the SIU, so far. Nobody should be treated like Mr. Nobody was, even if he was, likely, being a pain in the ass; nobody should not answer the police (or SIU) truthfully each and every time.

Nobody should be dying like courageous Mr. Mark did, villainously shot down on the gritty streets of Ontario’s principal city in reprisal killings, grim kinds of public execution.

But they are, in today’s Ontario.