Bronx yesterday, Chicago today

I linked to this piece in La Presse on the weekend about a shooting in Little Burgundy a year ago. The writers included the one-sentence paragraph “La scène ne se déroule ni à Chicago ni à Miami.”

Ted Rutland tweeted in response to La Presse, with an example, that “30 years ago, the media fed a moral panic about Black crime by referring to parts of Montreal as the Bronx. Today, during a new moral panic, the reference is Chicago.”

The mayors of five Quebec cities are challenging the federal leaders to say what they will do about gun crime.

My attention was drawn by chance to these July figures from Statistics Canada on homicides in Canada. I downloaded the CSV and here’s a PDF of the per capita homicide figures to look at. Per capita, Saskatoon is the homicide capital of Canada. The only town in Quebec slightly over the Canadian average is Gatineau. Trois-Rivières has a higher homicide rate than Montreal, which is down there just above St John’s, Newfoundland. Saguenay and Sherbrooke are near the bottom of the list.

OK granted. There has been some gunfire. Nobody wants there to be more. But can we see the metaphors, as dissected by Rutland, as chiefly a racist impulse? I am seriously of two minds about this. I think the panic about the shootings is partly of media creation and partly because it’s a dual election season – but then I think yeah, but those are real bullets, and occasionally someone ends up really dead.

We just have to keep our heads about this.