Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Crime rates are a real problem
Community favours continued hysteria over empirical arguments
By: Dan Lett
Posted: 01/19/2011 1:00 AM |
You may not know it, but Winnipeg had a 31 per cent drop in homicides in 2010. There were 32 murders in 2009, but only 22 last year. Given our national reputation as the Devil's Island of Canadian cities, that's got to be reason for celebration. Gold stars for the cops. Perhaps a parade.
But not only have there been no celebrations, there hasn't even been a news release. And that makes me suspect a parade is probably out of the question.
Why so hush-hush? Although crime rates are great fodder for debate, most sensible commentators and analysts will tell you a profound decrease in the number of homicides, while not a bad thing, is not proof of anything, really.
So it is with great relief that we report that nobody has used the dip in homicides for political purposes. Mayor Sam Katz, Premier Greg Selinger, Attorney General Andrew Swan and even Winnipeg Police Chief Keith McCaskill have been silent on this development. Now, if we could somehow get our leaders to show as much restraint and decorum when crime rates go up, then we'd have a shot at a fair and reasoned debate. The fact is that much smaller increases in crime rates have anchored shrill campaigns whose sole purposes is convincing the citizenry that we're on the highway to hell. Throw in an election, and just about everybody believes that an increase in crime rates are proof of the impending apocalypse.
Let's face it, Canadians are junkies for crime rates. The media love them because they boil down complex social problems into tidy, bite-sized numbers. (For proof see the monstrosity known as Maclean's Magazine's "Most Dangerous Cities in Canada" issue, where a handful of additional crimes in one category can label an entire community as most dangerous.) Politicians love them because they are devastating campaign weapons. Police love them because they help justify massive increases in public expenditures for helicopters and increasing numbers of cops.
However, in our less shrill moments, we know there are problems with crime rates. We know these numbers do not actually measure crimes, but charges laid. At some level, we understand that in an era when overcharging is necessary to ensure the gross majority of cases end with plea bargains, the number of charges laid may or may not reflect the number of actual crimes.
We may also acknowledge that the most densely populated jurisdictions tend to have lower overall violent crime and murder rates, which spreads the number of crimes over an exponentially larger populace. And that the number of crimes does not necessarily increase at the same pace as growth in population. That is not always the case; in Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia regularly have much lower violent crime and murder rates than Manitoba or Saskatchewan, despite having smaller populations. But there are many more examples where population density skews the statistics.
Consider that New York City (8.4 million residents) has roughly the same homicide rate as Denver (600,000 people). You would never know from the per capita crime rate that Gotham City records between 400 and 500 murders a year, while Denver hovers around 40. Now, let's talk about which of these cities is more "dangerous."
The other problem is that smaller communities are vulnerable to enormous lurches in crime rates because they start with relatively few crimes to start with. One year ago, Toronto celebrated the fact that its murder rate had decreased by 12 per cent from 2008, evidence that "People City" was much safer than the year before. In reality, that decrease represents just eight fewer murders from 2008.
The other inescapable fact is that the community at large prefers to reject all reasonable empirical arguments in favor of continued hysteria. I remember a story in the Toronto Sun published in the summer of 2009, which reported that violent crime had dropped in Toronto by more than five per cent. The headline of the story was, "Low crime rate, but high anxiety." The story's first paragraph captured the national mindset when it comes to crime statistics: "Toronto's crime continues to go down, but that doesn't mean people feel safer, says a mother whose son was murdered."
It's quite likely the mother of a murdered teenager will never feel safe again. Unfortunately, that mother is not an expert in community safety. She is an expert, lamentably, in personal loss. And yet, she will be used by various ethically deprived constituencies to prove that for many politicians and media types, the crime problem never gets better, even when it gets better.
So let's thank our various Gods, and the police, and perhaps even the politicians (but not the media) for the fact that murders are down in Winnipeg. But let's not organize a parade just yet.
dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 19, 2011 A6