Toronto's Do West Fest took over the streets of Little Portugal this past weekend, drawing enormous crowds to one of the city's biggest summer street festivals. But the popular event is now facing a wave of complaints, as attendees and police describe an outing that became dangerously overcrowded and was marred by a string of thefts. What was meant to be a celebration has turned into a debate over crowd safety and policing.
Many of the complaints centered on just how packed the festival became. Attendees described being crammed in like a can of sardines, with stretches where people were literally shoulder to shoulder and could not really walk. In some spots, people could not move at all, creating what some described as genuinely dangerous zones where the sheer density of the crowd became a hazard in itself.
The crush spilled over into the surrounding streets. Footage showed cars trying to get through with no one there to direct traffic, leaving drivers and pedestrians to navigate the chaos on their own. In some spots, passengers had to take matters into their own hands, stepping in to manage the flow where official direction was missing and the crowds had overwhelmed the area.
The problems went beyond the crowding. One attendee said plainly that they had been robbed at the festival. According to Toronto police, there were 41 calls for service for theft throughout the event, and of those, 36 were for the pickpocketing of cell phones. The concentration of so many people in tight spaces appeared to create easy opportunities for thieves working the crowd.
Police also reported making seven arrests over the course of the festival, including five for assault. It remained unclear whether those arrests were connected to footage that had been circulating from the event. Even so, the figures pointed to a weekend in which both petty theft and violence added to the strain on an event already struggling to manage its numbers.
The festival's managing director addressed the policing question directly in a statement to CBC. She said organizers had asked for nearly twice as many paid duty officers as the previous year, but that the request was not fulfilled because other events had stretched Toronto police resources thin. To compensate, she said, they had increased the amount of private security on hand during the festival.
For their part, Toronto police said Saturday's crowd, which organizers estimate may have exceeded one million visitors over the entire weekend, was larger than in previous years and posed a number of challenges. Those included hundreds of illegally parked cars clogging the area. The pressure ultimately led police to start shutting the event down early, at 10 p.m. on Saturday night, in an effort to bring the situation under control.