Jul 10
27
Canadian drop-in-crime stats mask darker factors
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Edmonton Journal – July 25, 2010
Drop-in-crime stats mask darker factors; In last fifty years, actual rates are up threefold, violent incidents up fivefold
By Lorne Gunter
Has crime really fallen precipitously in Canada in the past decade, or have many of us merely given up reporting minor instances to the police because there is no longer any point in doing so? It’s probably a little of both. This past Tuesday, Statistics Canada released its annual report on police-reported crime. It claimed a 17-per-cent drop in crime in the past decade.
That stat was immediately grabbed by opposition politicians and the federal government’s detractors in the media as proof that the Tories’ get-tough-on-crime strategy is misplaced. Commentators and opposition critics insisted the Tories’ plan to build $5 billion or more in new prisons, to put more criminals behind bars and to keep them there longer was nothing more than pandering to the ill-informed masses. The populous has whipped itself into a frenzy over crime because of a few high-profile shootings, analysts sneered, but Tuesday’s stats proved there was nothing to worry about, that recent experiments in lenient sentencing – such as conditional sentences and sentences with no jail time – were working to bring crime down by encouraging criminals to reconsider their actions.
There’s little doubt crime has come down since its peak in the early 1990s. Demographers have been predicting for years it would. Crime is a young person’s racket, mostly a young man’s racket. And as the birthrate has fallen, and as the number of young men aged 16 to 30 has decreased, crime has come down. One of the reasons immigrant and Aboriginal communities are overrepresented in crime stats is that they have a disproportionate number of young men relative to the Canadian-born and non-Aboriginal population.
But has crime come down as much as StatsCan and the Tories’ critics claim? While the answer is a little complicated, the short response is “no.” Although crime is down relative to its peak in 1991, it is still high compared with historic levels. Moreover, there is plenty of reason to believe the rates are higher than those issued by StatsCan simply because the nation’s number gatherer relies on crimes reported to police, and there is ample evidence that many Canadians have simply given up reporting minor crimes to the local constabulary. …
Over the past two decades, there has been a far smaller drop off in victimization rates gleaned in surveys than in police-reported crime stats, about six per cent versus 17 per cent. That likely indicates that Canadians are suffering more crime than they are reporting.
Police in most major cities no longer come to your home if you report a break-in, particularly if there is little damage. They issue a file number over the phone so you can make a claim with your insurance company and end their interest there.
Under the 2002 Youth Criminal Justice Act, police are also discouraged from laying charges against young offenders. If they can at all avoid it, they are to keep those under 18 from acquiring a police record. This may not directly dampen crime statistics, but indirectly, if victims know the police are unlikely to do anything to young perpetrators, they will be discouraged from even calling police – and that does drive down crime statistics. …
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