In Toronto you can't describe a killer as a nagger

On Boxing Day, 2005, post-Christmas shoppers looked on in horror as 15-year-old Jane Creba was shot in broad daylight outside Toronto's Eaton Centre. She wasn't the intended victim, just an innocent bystander who got caught in the crossfire of a gunfight between two gangs. Those involved, a couple of whom were actually convicted years later, were, errr, gentlemen of the coloured persuasion. "Coloured", as in "black".

Walt had something to say about this just over two years ago in "Another example of racist over-policing". One of the points I was trying to make is that it's no longer politically correct to refer to the gangstas as "black" or "coloured" or the most offensive word in the English language. And you can't say "African-American" since they're almost invariably "Jamaican-Canadian". That's a fact. The police know it, anyone who's not wilfully blind knows it, and the media knows it. But...the media won't say it, because it's not PC.

Fast forward to the same locale -- the Eaton Centre -- yesterday around 6 p.m. Pandemonium erupted at the largest shopping mall in downtown Toronto after a shooter fired a hail of bullets into a food court packed with weekend shoppers. A 25-year-old man was killed. Seven other people were injured by the gunfire, and scores more crushed or trampled in the frenzied mass exodus that followed the shooting spree.

Toronto police, in a sudden and unusual display of acuity, think the was a targeted one, which caught innocent bystanders in the middle. The boys in blue [or black? Ed.] vowed to track the suspect down.

Do we have a description of the gunman? Indeed we do. A witness said the shooter was "a dark-skinned man wearing a hoody and baggy pants." That narrows it down to about 20,000 denizens of North America's most multicultural city, but hey, it's a start.

Toronto, unusually for a North American city, has no fewer than four more-or-less daily newspapers: the Toronto Sun, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. (The latter two like to refer to themselves as "national" newspapers but are in fact written and edited -- sort of -- in Toronto.)

How many of those papers printed that description, or any reference whatsoever to the race of the perp? Just one. Three cheers for the Sun and a PC raspberry to the three who are too timid to call a spade a spade.