Statistics released yesterday by the TTC show what many had anticipated: crime has been increasing in Toronto’s transit system.
TTC’s CEO Richard Leary released a monthly report Wednesday that showed offences — defined as assaults, robberies and thefts in the report — against customers increased by 45 per cent from November to December last year.
The city announced on Jan. 26 it would add 20 community safety ambassadors, 50 security guards and 55 special constables to the transit system.
Myron Demkiw, Toronto’s chief of police, said there will be 80 special constables throughout the TTC and across 16 divisions, active at all times.
The number of assault incidents and threat incidents to TTC employees increased, but other incidents decreased, the report said. Wednesday’s report said the number of offences against TTC staff decreased to 6.3 offences per 100 employees in December, down from 6.7 in November.
In contrast, the number of offences against customers was 2.4 per one million customer trips in December, or 145 incidents, compared to 1.85 per million, or 100 incidents in November, Leary’s report said.
A recent survey indicated slightly more than a third of all TTC daily riders feel unsafe on the system. Abacus Data found 45 per cent of daily think it’s safe while 37 per cent think it’s unsafe. Eighteen per cent answered neither, according to the survey of 1,000 conducted between Feb. 3 and 7.
Maryan Khan, a transit user who uses the Humber College bus station, said she thinks the city’s boost in security is a good plan.
“I think once in a while you have a weirdo on the bus and it’s nice to be able to control that. Sometimes people are too afraid to say anything out loud, but to have someone there is helpful,” Khan said.
Alan de Pass, a Humber practical nursing student and a daily TTC user, is not impressed with Toronto’s transit safety plan. He rides the bus and subway home from campus and used to have to take the packed Dundas streetcar to work every day.
“It’s not a safety plan,” de Pass said. “They’re just spending tens of millions more dollars on police that we don’t need.”
De Pass said the number of new special constables should be “zero.”
A safety plan would increase services “so there are not thousands of people jammed onto the train all at once,” de Pass said. He said money should be diverted from the police budget to shelters so people don’t need to live on the TTC in the winter.
The scale of Toronto’s transit system is immense with 2,114 buses, 60 battery-electric buses, 204 streetcars and 150 trains, a total of 2,528 vehicles.
Stephen Holyday, one of five city councillors who sits on the TTC Board, said in an interview with Humber News in January that the presence of 55 additional special constables serves as a deterrent.
Shelagh Pizey-Allen, a spokesperson for TTC Riders, a group that advocates for improved transit service, said special constables are “there to enforce fares at a time when fares are going up in the budget.”
The recently passed budget includes a 10-cent fare hike and reduced service, with up to 10-minute wait times for the subway in off-peak hours.
“That means there’ll be fewer people around,” Pizey-Allen said. “These service cuts will drive transit users away from the TTC at a time that we need to be bringing them back because there is safety in numbers.”
But Holyday said fare evasion makes customers feel less secure.
“You know when someone has slipped by and that erodes your trust and your sense of security, even though it’s about money, the fare payment,” he said. “You see that going on around you and you wonder is someone watching?”
Holyday doesn’t link the unhoused to violent incidents on TTC, but “heard some people discuss the noticeable presence of people using the system as a shelter.”
The issue of unhoused people seeking shelter in the TTC is “about people choosing that as a place of refuge or a place of shelter in lieu of a different option,” he said.
Part of the city’s plan is to hire 10 new “Streets to Home” workers who will liaise with community safety teams to provide outreach services.
Pizey-Allen said presenting Streets to Homes staff as a solution to safety issues is “troubling.”
“It does conflate homeless people with the increase in violence and homeless people are actually sometimes the victims of violence, as we’ve seen,” she said.
It is not the role of these workers to support people in a mental health crisis, Pizey-Allen said.
“Their role is to connect with people who are experiencing homelessness, from streets to homes. What homes, right? There’s not enough shelter space,” she said.
TTC Riders are calling for full funding of the low-income fare pass and for the city council to look at implementing a parking levy for commercial parking lot landlords and large malls.
“It could generate hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The TTC isn’t just facing a deficit this year. It’s facing a deficit in years to come,” Pizey-Allen said.
ATU Local 113, which represents TTC workers, said in a statement via email the presence of special constables is a “step in the right direction,” but is also only a “band-aid solution.”
“An increase in special constables can’t tackle these underlying root causes, and only adequate funding in these areas can result in any long-term change,” the union said. “Our workers continue to be in fear. No one should be scared to go to work.”
For Pizey-Allen, there are no easy answers. Finding solutions to violence in transit is as complex as solving the problem of violence in society at large.
“There’s not one single solution to safety issues. There’s nothing inherent about public transit that’s unsafe,” she said. “It’s a public space.”