First of all, Mr. Moore, I concur. I think it's important to maintain a perspective here. This is not youths out of control in our communities. The overwhelming majority of young people in our city are decent, law-abiding young people. They just want to live safely and get ahead.
The activities we're talking about are limited to a relatively small number—perhaps no more than a thousand violent gang members. Even though we've identified significantly more people involved in gangs, they're involved in other criminal activity that the law is adequate to deal with, with respect to drug dealing, theft, and other types of crimes. But the truly violent are a relatively small number. In Jamestown, the community I spoke of earlier, we kept about 45 people in custody this summer and the level of violent crime in that community plummeted by over 50%.
We had a similar experience, by the way, in Scarborough. There were a number of murders in 2003 and early 2004. In fact, the same spike that we experienced in 2005 occurred in that time period as well out in the southeast and northeast parts of Scarborough. Two gangs were responsible, the Galloway Boys and the Malvern Crew. We did very significant investigations targeting both individual groups. The group of the Galloway Boys was twelve individuals whom we apprehended and kept in custody. They've been through preliminary hearing, and I can't speak too publicly about the evidence against them, but the allegations are that they were involved in multiple murders and multiple shootings in that community.
When we took those twelve individuals off the street—this number is extraordinary and I have to share it with you—violent crime in Scarborough, which is a community of over half a million people, dropped 40%. It's not that those individuals were responsible, but I think others took note and were deterred from their behaviours by the real consequences that those twelve and others faced, because we followed that up with a similar investigation in Malvern.
Just taking them off the street isn't the whole job. I want to be very clear on that. We then went into those neighbourhoods in significant numbers, in uniform, to restore a sense of safety and to empower the people who live in those communities to take back their own communities and have the confidence and courage to come forward to provide real opportunities and good role models for the young people in those communities. It made a huge difference in those neighbourhoods.
I actually live in that neighbourhood and I know the difference. Confidence was restored and a sense of safety was restored because the most violent individuals—a handful, but the most violent handful you could possibly imagine—were incarcerated. Once they were out of the community, the world changed for everybody; there was a 40% reduction, and it lasted for several months. A 40% reduction in violent crime in that community was hugely significant to those of us who live there. It improved the quality of life for everyone, because a dozen individuals were no longer able to prey on that community.