Once again local residents are left little recourse but to take matters into their own hands in this recent letter to anybody at the city that might care.
We are a group of residents living in the blocks between Gerrard and Carlton, Sherbourne and Parliament Streets.
We have become concerned with the increasing amount of crime and illegal activity happening in our neighbourhood. We are fully aware that choosing to live in the downtown east side of Toronto provides a neighbourhood in constant change. We like the dynamic and are willing to take reasonable amounts of the good with the not so great. We have however noticed in the past few years that the levels of crime have increased significantly and while these are regularly reported to the police, they are unable to provide adequate protection, due to unfair allocations of resources city-wide that ignore the greater needs in our neighbourhood (we can provide statistics on the massive skewing of social housing, homeless shelters, etc in this ward relative to all other wards in the City but suspect you already have those).
We have been subject over the last few years to a far greater amount of break-ins, unauthorized entry into homes asking for money and food, stolen bikes, graffiti, vandalism, porch thefts, garage thefts, car windows broken and cars keyed, people having sex in our back alley, drugs being sold, people being passed out or drinking and doing drugs in our front yards and alleys, public urination, etc, etc.
We do not feel that we can continue to allow this rapid increase in crime to directly impact us and therefore have felt it necessary to retain the services of a private security company which will be doing weekly patrols through our streets and alleys. We understand that you have had discussions with another part of SW Cabbagetown (to the south of our block) so we would welcome an expansion of those efforts, although we have heard that those have been limited.
The private security company is the same as used by our neighbours – Primary Defence Corp. (905) 744-9997. They will begin their patrols this Friday and Saturday night and will do so every Friday and Saturday. They have indicated that they will have no direct interaction with anyone that they observe on their patrols. They will call 911 if they observe any suspicious activity and will wait for police to arrive. We felt that it was necessary to inform you of this in the hopes that the security company can work with police and social services to address these issues.
Thank you and if you would like to reach any of us, please feel free to contact us by the emails listed above or you can telephone me at 647-966-6259. We would be pleased to speak with you about this.