Pickle Barrel
IT SENT SHOCK waves through the city.
Last April, two suspects entered a Steele Valley Road home at 5:15 a.m., assaulting the shocked owners. An 18-year-old son, hidden from the attackers, phoned 911. What began as a home invasion ended in gunfire, with one suspect dead after being shot by police as he tried to flee in a stolen white pickup. It was a tragic end to what has become a rash of often violent home invasions in Richmond Hill and Thornhill neighbourhoods.
A disturbing trend was emerging: burglars targeting some of Toronto’s most affluent neighbourhoods, often with weapons, leaving victims bound and helpless before making off with cash and property.
Police believed the Steele Valley Road robbers were responsible for four other home invasions in the region. In four out of five cases, a gun was seen. On Feb. 24, a couple was held up at gunpoint in their Old Colony Road home.
Two weeks later, three men with an unknown weapon stole cash and property from a couple on Woodland Acres Crescent in Vaughan.
A month later, a couple was held by two men in balaclavas wielding a hammer, who forced the victims into their car, drove them a short way and left them deserted in the street.
“You don’t expect this to happen to you,” one victim, a 55-year-old Richmond Hill resident, told reporters at the time.
Residents became increasingly alarmed as the home invasions continued. In May, a pregnant Vaughan woman was hospitalized after being assaulted, and, one month later, another couple was held up at gunpoint in their Richmond Hill home.
Was this a one-time string of home invasions or a sign of a growing crime wave? On the surface, it appears crime is on the rise in Thornhill and Richmond Hill.
According to police statistics, the overall demands for the police service have increased from 174,611 to 242,028 over the past five years. Drug violations have increased from 1,442 in 2001 to 2,416 in 2005. Weapons v i o l a t i o n s jumped from 460 to 658 in the same period.
So what’s causing the spike in criminal activity?
Largely, population growth, according to police comments at the time. York’s population has risen from 779,063 in 2001 to over 918,000 in 2006, making it Canada’s sixth largest region. Since 1971 the population of York Region has grown a staggering 550 per cent. With an influx of people inevitably comes increased crime. But when measured against population growth, overall crime has actually decreased in the region.
Crimes against property, for example, increased from 25,572 in 2001 to 27,296 in 2004, but plunged to 23,620 in 2005. And between 2001 and 2004, crimes against persons dropped from 6,825 to 6,669.
Still, an almost 50 per cent increase in weapon and drug violations is something to be concerned about — especially when these crimes, which can be horrific, are occurring at home.
Police and community groups
have fought back,
adopting a proactive
approach to fighting
crime in the region. Sgt.
Mark Altermann heads
the York Regional Police
Crime Prevention Unit.
His job includes supervising all crime prevention officers, lending support to neighbourhood watch programs and educating community and business groups about home protection, personal safety, robbery prevention and more community initiatives.
Altermann says the fear caused by the string of home invasions last spring and summer can be attributed to the high-profile nature of the crimes.
“Whenever there are crimes that are high profile, there is always a difference between the reality of crime and the perception of crime,” he says. “Levels of concern residents have increases or decreases based on the input they have from their surroundings … [but] the reality is considerably different from the perceptions people have of crime, because you have a few incidents that become sensationalized and are more newsworthy, and it seems to capture people’s imagination.”
This is a natural reaction to highprofile and serious crimes, says Gillian Freeman, executive director of Victim Services of York Region, a non-profit, charitable organization that offers 24-hour support to persons victimized by crime. Community members often experience the same reaction to crime as those directly affected.
After a series of home invasions, members of the community might experience fear, anxiety and nervousness, even if they weren’t directly exposed to the crime.
“These are natural reactions to people peripherally exposed,” she says. Freeman adds that home invasions, especially the gruesome ones so often reported in the news, can be particularly traumatizing.
“The home is supposed to be a place of comfort and safety. Now people go there and get anxious and scared.”
To address residents’ concerns, Altermann and his officers have engaged the community by teaching them how to prevent crime.
CPTED (Crime Prevention through Environmental Design), for example, teaches people how to configure physical space to deter crime by, for instance, the effective use of lighting.
The York Regional Police website (www.yrp.ca) has several crime prevention resources, including tips on home safety and security, as well as information on how to get more involved in community crime prevention initiatives.
Police efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. Elliot Frankl, a Thornhill resident who sits on the York Regional Police Community Crime Prevention Committee and runs a weblog called the Thornhill Community Report, says police have done an exceptional job connecting with local groups.
It’s important, he says, for the police and residents to have an open line of communication.
“The police want to know the perception of the people. York Region is a big area and the police can’t be everywhere, knowing what’s going on in every area,” Frankl says. “I would honestly say that the York Regional Police are doing a really great job.”
One initiative that couples York police and the community is called P.A.C.E.S., or Police and Community Education Seminars, a 17-week community education program designed to foster partnerships between the public and police.
P.A.C.E.S. includes presentations and demonstrations on robbery prevention, target hardening, crime scene investigation and more.
The purpose of P.A.C.E.S., Altermann says, “is to educate the public on what police do and how they do it as well as what [residents] can do to help out the police in their area.”
On a chilly Wednesday night in January, the 16th week of the P.A.C.E.S. program, some 30 residents from across York Region have gathered at Safety Village at Bruce’s Mill Conservation Area near Stouffville to hear presentations about diversity and youth education.
Cindy Skillins, a local resident in attendance, has taken a leading role in crime prevention in York. She currently sits on several subcommittees of the Community Crime Prevention Committee and is a member of neighourhood watch and Police and Community Together (PACT). She became very interested in policing after a series of break-ins in her neighbourhood about six years ago.
“I don’t think there’s a concern
about crime,” Skillins says, “[but] as
a community grows sometimes it
loses its personality. It becomes a
collection of people instead of a
collection of individuals.
Community cohesiveness gets lost.
While people still look out for their
neighbour, neighbourhood watch
tends to bring it together.”
Bringing people together tends to be the mission of Constable Shannon Riesberry, a school education officer who’s giving a PowerPoint presentation about youth education. The police’s goal, she says, is to connect with students while they’re young, to prevent trouble later in life.
“Hopefully, if we’re proactive in their adolescence, they’ll have fewer problems later in life as adults,” she says. One program Riesberry teaches is called Values, Influences & Peers, or VIP.
The program targets Grades 6 through 8 and includes lectures on vandalism, theft, bullying, peer pressure and drugs.
Educating youth about the consequences of crime is an increasingly important crime prevention strategy. Police statistics show that youth across the GTA are being arrested in record numbers.
In 2005, young people were involved in 29 per cent of all drug incidents, compared to 6.6 per cent in 1991. Suburban youth incidents involving prohibited weapons or weapons possession rose from 27 per cent in 1991 to 40.8 per cent in 2005 while youth involved in all violent crimes in the suburbs increased from 13.9 per cent to 17.6 per cent.
This is obviously a very disturbing trend, which hasn’t spared anyone — including the police force. Sgt. Riesberry says that she was herself once threatened by a student during an anti-crime presentation at an elementary school.
“I took off my bulletproof vest and said, ‘I think I’m safe in the school,’” she told the stunned crowd at the Stouffville P.A.C.E.S. seminar. “And he said, ‘Wanna bet?’”
Through initiatives like P.A.C.E.S., York Region police are better able to educate concerned citizens, who can apply what they’ve learned about crime prevention and help educate other members of the community. Several people at P.A.C.E.S. are leaders on the front line in community groups across Thornhill and Richmond Hill.
These are the people who are confronting crime in our community head-on.
Take Angel Freedman, for example. Freedman, a 39-year-old mother of two and a York University student, has been active in a neighbourhood residents’ association in Richmond Hill for 10 years, and she is currently its president.
Freedman’s latest project is implementing a program called Park Ambassadors, in conjunction with Constable Phil Houghton, the crime prevention officer for 2 District (which covers the Thornhill and Richmond Hill areas). Houghton conducts safety seminars all over the area including one recently in a local Thornhill home.
The Park Ambassadors group consists of residents who patrol our neighbourhood streets and parks, immediately reporting anything unusual to authorities.
The program was recently implemented in Vaughan and has 150 volunteers so far. Houghton says he hopes to expand the program across the region within the year. Freedman’s goal is to prevent crime and create a safer environment by fostering a sense of community. Neighbours who know one another look out for one another, she says.
“We feel safe here. We are not a
neighbourhood that closes our
doors. We are a neighbourhood that
opens them.” 
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