A ‘tide’ of illegal guns flowing across the border from the United States is fuelling gun violence in the city, according to Toronto Police.
An update on the challenge those guns pose came as police announced the arrest of a 13-year-old boy in connection with the city’s eighth murder of the year – a 15-year-old.
In Baltimore, crime-tolerant state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby seems willing to break the law herself.
When sworn in as Baltimore’s state’s attorney seven years ago, Marilyn Mosby was the first of a new wave of progressive prosecutors. She might now be the first to take an early retirement—perhaps to a federal penitentiary.
Last week, the Justice Department indicted Mosby on perjury charges. She allegedly made false statements on key documents while chasing a quick buck in real estate in 2020, avoiding penalties and taxes on withdrawals from her retirement accounts by claiming Covid-related economic hardship but without actually suffering any layoffs or reductions in her $248,000 salary. Then she neglected to mention a federal tax lien while mortgaging two Florida properties, one of which has already sold for a tidy gross profit of $151,000.
Retail crime has been rising throughout the US for the past five years, with organized criminal rings targeting stores everywhere from Woonsocket (Rhode Island) to Greensboro (North Carolina) to Grafton (Wisconsin). The National Retail Federation reported that store losses mounted from $453,940 per $1 billion in sales in 2015 to $719,458 in 2020.
The biggest increase over that period happened not during the pandemic but in 2019, when total losses from shoplifting surged to $61 billion, up from $50 billion the previous year. The COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021 moderated losses, largely because stores were closed or had curtailed operating hours. Now that retailing has resumed, crime has spiked again.
A 41-year-old Detroit man accused of setting fire to his girlfriend, who is pregnant with twins, has bonded out of a Wayne County jail for just $5,000 after posting ten percent of his $50,000 bond, according to a report.
Meanwhile in Toronto – MANDEL: Gun crime and the revolving door of justice
As the calendar hits the year 2022, mystery surrounding the deaths of Canadian billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman enters its fifth year without a single solid lead. As it happened, media appeared to get hot-under-the-collar after the video evidence produced grainy footage of an unidentifiable male walking past the front of the Sherman home.
An Ontario judge will not partially lift the ban on her reasons for releasing the man charged with the Canada Day murder of Toronto Police Const. Jeffrey Northrup despite the “troubling” and “inflammatory” comments made by public figures.
The proposal, called the “Victims’ Justice Ordinance,” was introduced as Lightfoot is under pressure to crack down on Chicago’s gun violence and high homicide rate. It was expected to prompt legal challenges from civil rights attorneys and social justice organizations, who believe the measure could wrongly accuse Black and Latino residents of being involved in gang activity.
A provincial bureaucrat fired after the alleged theft of $11 million in COVID-19 relief aid has been awarded $150,000 in legal costs by an Ontario court.
…. Madan was fired in the fall of 2020 as the $176,608-a-year computer leader on the Ministry of Education’s Support for Families initiative.
That program gave Ontario parents $200 per child under age 12 and $250 per child and youth under 21 with special needs to help with online schooling expenses early in the pandemic.
Last January, in civil court testimony that may not be used in the criminal case if it violates Charter-protected rights against self-incrimination, Madan admitted he “relaxed” computer security safeguards on the “free-flowing program” so additional payouts could be made to the same bank accounts.
“I thought there may be an opportunity to take the funds out … it looked like easy money for me,” he testified.
Barry Sherman faced a crushing payout — he owed $1 billion to other companies and had no intention of paying. Two of his most trusted advisers wanted him to show his favourite lieutenant the door. At home, things were better with Honey and the kids than in the past, but detectives’ notebooks quickly filled up with tales of past family turmoil and separate sleeping arrangements.
There’s an old saying in homicide investigations, “there are no secrets in a murder case,” something made abundantly clear in police documents newly unsealed by the court. The files, a collection of interview statements and police theories, also shed new light on Honey’s sister’s belief that the couple was murdered for religious reasons.
The father of slain UCLA student Brianna Kupfer has revealed that his 24-year-old daughter was not supposed to be working on the day she was stabbed in cold-blood inside a high-end furniture store – and he laid some blame for her death on politicians and their skewed priorities.
‘I blame what’s endemic in our society right now, is that everybody seems to be oriented on giving back rights and bestowing favor on people that rob others of their rights,’ Todd Kupfer told Fox News.
Kupfer said he is not blaming any politicians by name, but he argued that their job is ‘to make communities better, to make people care more, not to tear down communities by exposing them to people that are falling out the bottom, that really don’t care about other human beings and just think they can do whatever they like in our society.’
SIMCOE, Ontario, Jan. 18, 2022 /CNW/ – The family of Rodger Kotanko believes the gunsmith did not have to die. In a civil suit filed against Toronto police, the family alleges police unlawfully executed a search warrant and used excessive force when they shot and killed the 70-year-old in a military-style take down at his home outside Port Dover on November 3, 2021.
“The Kotanko family is holding Toronto police to account, so this doesn’t happen to someone else,” said Michael Smitiuch of Smitiuch Injury Law PC, the lawyer representing the Kotanko family. “Rodger Kotanko wasn’t able to defend himself, or his reputation, but his family will.”
H/T Jaedo Drax
Recent studies support a long-standing theory connecting police protests and rising violent crime.
In 2015 and 2016, the coincidence of a major surge in homicides following mass protests over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, prompted a heated debate about whether the demonstrations, and the anti-police hostility they engendered, helped cause the murder spike. Law enforcement leaders and some public commentators—including City Journal contributing editor Heather Mac Donald—identified a “Ferguson Effect,” whereby public scrutiny reduced police proactivity and led to an increase in violent crime. Supporters of the protests just as fervently derided the idea as imaginary and “debunked.”
Social scientists made a few contributions to this debate, but the research they produced offered limited insight into the causal relationship between scrutiny, proactivity, and crime.
One would have thought that after a repeat felon out on a $1,000 bail is alleged to have driven his car into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six people and injuring countless others, those who have sought to dismantle our criminal justice system would have recognized how their actions have created murderous carnage across the nation.
But that is far from the case and the lawless cannot believe their good fortune.
In America’s most important city, New York, and within Manhattan, its most famous borough, there is now a District Attorney who, in changing what his office will prosecute, has essentially redefined evil.
A federal grand jury indicted Baltimore’s top prosecutor Thursday on charges of perjury and making false mortgage applications in the purchase of two Florida vacation homes.
The four-count indictment alleges that Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, 41, lied about meeting qualifications for coronavirus-related distributions from a city retirement plan in 2020.
Federal prosecutors also allege that the Democratic prosecutor lied on 2020 application forms for mortgages to purchase a home in Kissimmee and a condominium in Long Boat Key.
Canadian housing prices are unaffordable, at least in part, because successive governments have failed to address the fact that Canada is one of the world’s foremost tax and secrecy havens, minus the palm trees.
In fact, the term “snow washing” has been coined to describe how easily dirty money can be washed clean, like the snow, in Canada. But there is some hope on the horizon.
Ontario housing shortage is worst in the country and threatens to exacerbate affordability woes
