Toronto's streets are where we celebrate. Must we give that up to feel safe?

The streets are ours. After the shooting at Salsa on St. Clair and a weekend of violence, how do we keep them that way?

Every shooting in the city is a horror. But there is a particular combination of sadness and anger and fear that sets in when violence explodes in a crowded public place — a place any of us could imagine ourselves and our families having been. Toronto experienced that after a mass shooting at a street party on Danzig Street in 2012, and a shootout in the Eaton Centre food court that same year.

That feeling emerged again on Saturday, when gunfire erupted at the Salsa on St. Clair street festival, sending hundreds of people running scared through alleys and side streets, and leaving two people dead and four others shot. It was not the only episode of gunfire of the weekend: a shooting in North York Friday night killed a man and injured two others, and a shootout outside a night club in the Port Lands early Sunday morning injured five more people. It’s a Monday for grieving.

It may be worth taking a moment to recognize that this weekend’s deaths brought the city’s homicide total so far this year to 13 — a low number both by North American big-city standards (Chicago, by comparison, has 221 murders so far this year, New York City 131) and by recent Toronto historical standards. But it is also worth acknowledging that shootings (including those in which no one is injured) are trending up. Torontonians have recently come to know about a guns-for-hire ring that seems connected to dozens of high-profile incidents.

Last year, the Piper Arms pub in Scarborough was shot up, and an eight-year-old lying in his own bed was killed by a stray bullet. That provides a different kind of context for the situations this weekend when gunfire erupted into our streets. Police Chief Myron Demkiw said the St. Clair incident was “heartbreaking and unacceptable,” and if most of us can agree that is an understatement, we also might acknowledge that when he called out the violence as “brazen” he seemed to put a finger on part of why the recent wave of gun crime is so disturbing.

Shootings in public, shootings for hire, gunfights in crowds. The violence is shockingly cavalier. The problems behind those statistics and the tragic incidents they reflect involve multiple overlapping policy areas that are each immensely complicated: the supply and availability of guns, many smuggled over the border; the lack of diversions to keep young people out of criminal life; the organized criminal rings that finance and command shootings; the policing and justice and bail systems that do or don’t prevent crime and recidivism.

These are not new problems, though surely every shocking death makes tackling them feel more urgent. There’s another, maybe more manageable, question arising from the shooting on St. Clair, which is how to secure increasingly crowded street festivals. Councillor Josh Matlow, on Sunday, suggested perhaps Salsa on St. Clair had outgrown its current location, and that perhaps it should be moved to a different venue such as a park where admission could be regulated and security could be tighter.

That line of thought didn’t begin with the shooting. After severe crowding, theft and sporadic fighting at Do West Fest last month, police closed the party early. After a mass casualty attack at a Filipino festival in Vancouver last year, the question of security (and the costs of it) at street parties became top of mind in Toronto.

The police department’s suggested requirements for the pedestrianization of Church Street this summer shocked politicians and threatened the very concept of closing streets to cars. Street parties are a treasured part of Toronto’s summer life. From community festivals like Taste of the Danforth to giant parades like Pride and Caribana, the streets are where we come together in large groups for joyful celebration.

Ending or curtailing that tradition due to a fear of violence might feel, to some of us, like too big a concession to make. There is so much insecurity and frustration in urban life; surely we need to hold on to the things that bring us together and give us joy? And yet, the fears are not unfounded.

Chaotic street scenes create dangerous situations. As Vancouver’s example showed, they can become targets for those who want to attack the innocent. As the St. Clair shooting appears to show, they are a terrifying place for criminal violence to erupt, endangering hundreds of bystanders.

What do you think? Is there something you think we should do to better secure parties like Salsa on St. Clair? Do you think that once festivals grow to a certain size or popularity, they need to move to a larger space that can be ticketed and cordoned off?

Or do you think there are ways to police them better to prevent danger without altering their nature? Do we need to sacrifice a treasured element of Toronto’s community celebrations, and their open nature, to protect ourselves from outbreaks of violence? Or are you more fearful of overreacting to what might prove to be isolated incidents?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.