Crime

Shoppers are being forced to wait as long as 40 minutes to buy basic essentials like baby formula and body wash as major retailers lock up products to counter skyrocketing rates of theft.

Reporters from Inside Edition visited five Targets, five Walmarts and five CVS stores in New York and New Jersey and timed how long it took for employees to retrieve different products from glass casings.

‘Everything’s locked up,’ journalist Lisa Guerrero said as she stepped inside a Target in Manhattan where baby formulas, razors and cleaning products were kept under lock and key.

For six months, the disappearance of $17.2 million in gold bars and cash from a warehouse at Toronto Pearson International Airport has remained a mystery. Now a lawsuit has given the public a glimpse into the victim’s view of the heist.

In April, the Peel Regional Police, who are responsible for the airport, announced that a special container holding the valuable goods was unloaded from an airplane, placed in a warehouse and then disappeared. The police force seemed baffled at the time and offered no other information, such as whom the container belonged to or even the name of the airline that flew it into the country.

Recent instances of Vermont store-goers detaining and even assaulting would-be thieves reveal growing societal tensions seeded by progressive policies. Vermont’s law enforcement services are anemic due to anti-police rhetoric, racialization of courts, and lax prosecutorial policies. Vermont is not enforcing basic criminal laws, as gang-related violence and property crimes transform communities, drug overdoses skyrocket, and businesses are compromised. Citizens are tired of being victimized by government failure: many are taking matters into their own hands.

A Toronto man who accidentally killed his boyhood friend while they were out shooting random people — including an innocent man who died on his birthday — has been convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and attempted murder.

On Oct. 1, 2019, Jeziah Blair-Taylor, Eric Rowe, and a third man (whose case is still before the courts) opened fire in three separate locations within 75 minutes in an area bounded by Finch Avenue W. to the north, Sheppard Avenue W. to the south, a short distance west of Jane Street and Driftwood Avenue to the east.

Sharing is good, but there are rules to passing out intelligence

When I was a kid growing up in southwestern Ontario I remember a video/song that extolled sharing. It was, so I learned through Google, produced by the United Church of Christ and went something like this: “That’s the way it is, truly-ooly-ooly is. It’s nice to share.”

I wonder if Cameron Ortis, the RCMP official charged by the Crown with “sharing” intelligence illegally, saw that video too?

A riveting new podcast about the Bernhard Goetz episode in 1980s New York nonetheless skews the tale—and the city’s history.

A few minutes into Vigilante, journalist Leon Neyfakh’s riveting and heart-wrenching new podcast, we hear from Garth Reed, a gravel-voiced New Yorker who had immigrated from Jamaica in the late twentieth century. He recalls traveling south through Manhattan on a dirty, graffiti-covered 2 train. It was a Saturday afternoon, just a few days before Christmas, in 1984. The train was not especially crowded, but most of its passengers had apparently eased away from four rambunctious black teenagers taking up a lot of space toward one end of the car. They were “hanging onto the handrails, swinging around, walking around the train,” Reed recalls.

“Britain is the best country to be black in” Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch confidently informed the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester this Tuesday. Is she right? Perhaps, and then again perhaps not, particularly if you’re a black adolescent living in London. I can certainly think of a number of black teenagers, senselessly slain within the last week, whose families might disagree with her.

There’s a reason shoplifting is rife

My small Shires market town reported a handful of crimes a year when we moved here a decade ago. Over the past year or so, every garage on my street has been burgled. Only last week an escaping shoplifter shoved my daughter to the ground while fleeing the local Londis. Police don’t even attend when you report incidents. The area has not seen a decline in prosperity — only in civic orderliness. And it’s a vicious cycle that burns out local civic participation. I know one town councillor who joined full of enthusiasm, only to resign a year later when officials suggested that, as there was no prospect of any police response to rising drug-taking and antisocial behaviour in the local park, maybe he and another councillor should themselves form a citizen patrol.

The closure of nine Target stores in coastal cities reflects poorly on Democrats

The discount department chain Target recently announced that it will be closing nine stores across the United States in cities such as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The stated reason is rampant organised retail theft, which has created more shrinkage (loss of inventory from other than sales) than can be dealt with, and an unsafe shopping environment driving prospective customers away. A precedence has already been set for this. Macys and Best Buy have closed a few of their stores citing similar reasons.

Many Democrats are claiming that the recent indictment of Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) proves that the current Justice Department provides equal justice to Democrats and Republicans. Although it is necessary to wait for the evidence to emerge before judgment is passed on this most recent indictment, what appears so far may be closer to equal injustice.

When Toronto police raided the workshop of renowned gunsmith Rodger Kotanko in November 2021 and shot him to death, questions swirled.

But while some details have since emerged, a few questions have remained: who was the lone customer inside the workshop during the raid that day in rural southern Ontario? And, what does that witness say happened?

A recently filed $2.6 million lawsuit sheds some light on that mystery.

It’s hard to imagine how a sombre journey to honour 11 fallen police officers could become even more melancholy.

But that was the reality of the 2023 Run to Remember relay from Toronto to Ottawa.