Life carries risk. Sooner or later you're going to die. But if you spend your entire life trying to avoid any possibility of death, not only will you die, but you will die never having lived.
Toronto is an enormous city. Even incredibly rare risks will show up on the evening news there once a month. Don't organize your life around the bullshit that shows up on the news. If you want to reduce risks, start with some statistics.
I agree with the sentiment, but nobody is talking about organizing life around not risking death, we are talking about whether to go out of our way to confront people we assume are criminals.
"Criminal" doesn't mean much these days. You're probably a criminal yourself if you've driven a car in the US or if you lived in the US after 1980 between the ages of 18 and 21. (I don't remember if Canadian law is as absurd.) The question is whether a petty thief is gonna cap you because you caught him stealing your laptop, and the answer is that it's very unlikely. The statistics khafra posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743973 suggest that, on average, you'd have to confront thieves between hundreds of times and tens of thousands of times before getting killed.
Toronto is an enormous city. Even incredibly rare risks will show up on the evening news there once a month. Don't organize your life around the bullshit that shows up on the news. If you want to reduce risks, start with some statistics.