From my employment, I learned to loathe those dives and the drunken mayhem that went along with them. Women passed out, boyfriends ( or maybe a stranger? ) dragging them away.
Agreed, to a point.
I have a much different perspective than yours, but in another time & place, I worked the door for a couple of years at a similar establishment. While lots of people are just there for a good time, a couple of drinks, some dancing/flirting or whatever, around 10% of the clientele were the type who would turn belligerent at the drop of a hat. They varied: students on Wednesdays, army types allowed off-base for the night on Thursdays, a representative sampling of the whole town on Friday & Saturday.
Lots of friendly types, but as part of a [nice & well-behaved] door team, I also disrupted date-rapes, broke up fights, got covered in blood a couple of times (not my own), saw a guy take a glass ashtray to the back of the head (scalps bleed!), called in the military police to cart away a couple of biting/spitting squaddies when I only had 40 people in the bar on a quiet night and even helped physically haul off brawlers who were outnumbering and attacking cops during a couple of full-blown street riots which happened outside the bar on consecutive Saturdays (all the bars were on the same strip). Anything can happen.
One lesson I took away is that cheap
signalling like tattoos or badass clothing is just that: cheap. Not everyone with a fake tan is a douchebag, and not every douchebag has a tribal tattoo. Douchebaggery comes from within.
In any full-to-the-brim bar/club of 700 people, there'll always be a few with a knife and probably one or two with a gun, no matter how you search. There'll always be drug dealers, and there will always be some coked-up idiot who is willing to spend a night in the cells just for the chance to throw a couple of punches at some perceived slight. There'll always be a couple of would-be rapists lounging around, and there will always be one or two people with downright mental health issues thrown in as a sort of wildcard.
Still, as I said, the majority of people are decent enough, if you just talk to them. Turns out that was 98% of the job: tedium broken up with chatting while keeping an eye on things.
Toronto is no different. Luckily in this case you knew who at least a couple of the aggressive drug abuser types were as soon as they walked in the door, although the Fords would surely immediately set off anyone's spidey sense.