Toronto Street Gangs: The Neighbourhood Crews and Two Decades of Police Projects

Toronto’s street gangs are named for the streets and housing complexes they come from, and for twenty years the city’s police have answered them with named projects: mass pre-dawn raids, hundreds of charges, and guns traced across the American border. This is what the public record shows about who police have targeted, what the courts have found, and where things stand now.

Toronto does not have a single dominant street gang. It has many small, local crews, most of them tied to one street, one housing complex or one corner of a neighbourhood: Driftwood and Jamestown, Dixon and Galloway, Malvern and Chester Le. Toronto police have described the scale in one word. In August 2019, Insp. Joseph Matthews, head of the Integrated Gun and Gang Task Force, said police were aware of “hundreds” of gangs operating in the city and called it “a street gang turf war” (CP24). No current official count of gangs or members has been published.

How Toronto’s Gangs Are Organized

Police and courts usually name Toronto gangs after where they are from. The Driftwood Crips take their name from Driftwood Avenue near Jane and Finch, the Jamestown Crips from Rexdale, and the Dixon City Bloods (also called the Dixon Bloods) from Dixon Road in Etobicoke. When Toronto police announced Project Kraken in 2019, they said the gang had “named themselves after” the Chester Le neighbourhood in Scarborough (CTV).

The Bloods and Crips labels that appear in police announcements are local set names. Police have used them for the Driftwood Crips, Jamestown Crips, Eglinton West Crips, Falstaff Crips and Dixon City Bloods, but none of the sources reviewed for this report describes a formal link to the American Bloods or Crips. In 2012, the Globe and Mail reported that the city’s gangs were “smaller, their members more loosely organized than they were 20 years ago.”

That looseness matters in court. In R. v. Abdullahi (2023 SCC 19), a ruling that arose from a Toronto gun-trafficking investigation, the Supreme Court of Canada held that a criminal organization requires “some form of structure and degree of continuity,” and warned that shared characteristics such as ethnicity or neighbourhood are “irrelevant in identifying the existence of a criminal organization.”

The Gun Pipeline

The guns behind Toronto’s gang violence come overwhelmingly from the United States, according to Toronto Police Service figures:

The pipeline shows up in the projects themselves. Police said the Dixon City Bloods, targeted in Project Traveller in 2013, moved guns across the Detroit–Windsor border, and handguns linked to the Malvern Crew case were found at the Windsor tunnel in 2004 (Globe and Mail).

Two Decades of Police Projects

Since 2004, Toronto police and their partners have run at least eighteen named or major projects against specific street gangs. The figures below are the ones police announced at the time. They are allegations: arrests and charges are not convictions, and for most of these projects no public court outcome has been reported.

The Crews Police Have Named

The list below is limited to gangs that Toronto police or a court have named, grouped by area, with the project that targeted each. Inclusion is not a finding that any group is a criminal organization in law.

What the Courts Have Found

Charges are where most of these stories end in public. Court outcomes for the large projects are rarely reported, and for most of the gangs above, no published ruling declaring the group a criminal organization was found for this report. Two decisions stand out.

The Current Picture

Toronto police figures point to a younger profile. Youth firearm arrests rose from 59 in 2022 to 78 in 2023 and 128 in 2024, with 102 recorded in 2025 as of Sept. 21 (CP24, citing Toronto police). The most recent project against a named street gang was Project Foxxx in August 2024, against the Jamestown Crips. Police said those charged were aged 16 to 40.

Recent operations have focused as much on the gun supply as on the gangs. Project Red Zone and Project Playfight, both announced in September 2026, targeted gun-trafficking networks, and police did not name a gang in either. Back in 2019, then-chief Mark Saunders said “street gang subculture” is responsible for the majority of violence in the city (CBC). The share of Toronto crime guns traced to the U.S. rose from about three-quarters in 2019 to 88 per cent in 2024.

Every accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Arrest and charge figures are those police announced at the time and are allegations only. Gang names are given as Toronto police or the courts used them; their inclusion here is not a finding that any group is a criminal organization in law. No person under 18 is named.