Issues - Crime & the Police

One of the five priorities of the Harper Conservative government is getting tough on crime. Their solution is to put more police on the streets, mandatory sentences for violent crime and longer sentences for young offenders.

This policy was designed to attract middle-class and rural voters who have an exaggerated fear of crime. The news headlines play into those fears. In recent years gun violence in Toronto has resulted in the deaths of a number of young men, most of them black. When a teenaged girl was shot in broad daylight on Yonge Street in the midst of an election there was outrage from the public. Conservative politicians, trolling for votes, responded by promising they would be tough on crime.

But is crime out of control? Crime, even violent crime, has been dropping for several years. The crime rate in 2006 in Canada was the lowest in twenty-five years, and the province with the lowest crime rate in the country is Ontario. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada

The Toronto Police Services Board reports that total crime in 2007 in the city dropped 5% from the previous year. Almost all categories of crime including violent crime dropped significantly but murders increased by 20%. In 2006 there were 70 murders in Toronto and in 2007 there were 84. http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/publications/files/reports/2007statsreport.pdf

In the last fifteen years the crime rate has been gradually dropping not only in Canada but across North America. The reason for this is complex but most experts agree that it is mainly because of demographic changes in our population. Poor, young males commit the majority of crimes. Poverty has not been shrinking, but the proportion of young people in our population is smaller than it ever has been as a result of the drop in the birth rate. Crime is measured as the number of offences proportional to the population. The shrinking of the proportion of young people in the population has led to the shrinking of the crime rate.

This is not to say that there are not problems with crime in Toronto. The drug trade is particularly troublesome because addicts often commit property crimes to get the money they need to feed their addictions, and women who are addicted frequently turn to prostitution.

The use of handguns appears to be on the rise. This also is related to the drug trade. Criminals feel they have to enforce their own form of rough justice, and they can only do that by using guns. Young black men in particular have little confidence that the police will protect them.

Miller’s call to make all handguns illegal is an effort to save lives of young people. In rejecting that appeal, Stephen Harper and the federal Conservative Party illustrate that their policy on crime is self serving and ignores the real public safety concerns.

But will getting tough on crime and mandatory sentences solve the problem? That seems highly unlikely. Jails are institutions where inmates learn how to become criminals and take on a criminal identity. Individuals sentenced to jail ultimately come back into the community, and if employers will not hire them because of their criminal record, and if they have been socialized to take on a criminal identity while they were in jail, then it is almost inevitable that they will return to a life of crime.

There is another way to handle crime and that is to improve the opportunities for poor young males. Our society provides tremendous subsidies to middle and upper income young people through the education system. The poor, of course, are eligible to stay in school but the drop out rate for low income kids is much higher than for the children of the middle class and is even higher for those who drift into crime. As a result far fewer tax dollars go to lower income kids than those from middle and upper income homes. That is justification enough to spend more money on youth at risk. (This is true unless the low income dropout goes to jail. It costs about $100,000 a year to keep a person incarcerated.)

David Miller came into office in 2003 with a proposal for a neighbourhood based crime prevention program termed a “Safety Program.” It was a combination of putting more police on the streets, a community policing program and a “youth jobs” program. He established an advisory group headed by Ontario Chief Justice Roy McMurtry and four of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods were targeted.

The youth jobs program was to be a public/private sector effort and some things have been accomplished. The TTC hired 100 young people in the summer of 2006 and 750 young people will pass through the provincially funded jobs-for-youth program. Another 100 jobs will be created for “at-risk” youth by the province. But the private sector has done little.

Miller has been attacked for his lack of progress in combating crime by Councillor Michael Thompson who complains, “There is no community safety plan.” Miller counters by saying, “We’ve done exactly the right thing. Even if we can’t bring a job to every kid, you can bring the hope of that, which is a very powerful thing.”

The reality is that there are few political leaders willing to commit the resources necessary to attack crime and the underlying social problems that lead to crime. If we are to develop an effective strategy to deal with crime, then we must deal with the problems faced by at-risk young people. The program must be multi-faceted and it must move away from a reliance on police and jails. This is an outline of an effective policy.

Toronto Police Chief, William Blair, has adopted the model of community based policing. Under this policy the mandate of the police is not only to fight crime but to help solve social problems in communities. The aim is to take officers out of their cars and into the neighbourhoods to deal with social problems of all kinds. Some attack Blair as begin soft on crime but this is an important development in community building and an approach to deal with the root causes of crime. It must be supported.
The police must continue to make it a priority to recruit officers that reflect the ethnic and racial composition of the people in the city.
Priority must be given by police to eliminating handguns through the use of amnesty programs and enforcement. Pressure on the federal government to ban all handguns must continue.
The drug trade must be dealt with in a more comprehensive way. We need new laws legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana, and more effective drug rehabilitation programs. At the same time police have to control “shooting galleries” that cause problems for neighbourhoods. One way to do this is high visibility surveillance. (Two police cars parked outside a suspected shooting gallery can do wonders in decreasing the drug trade.)
Special programs must be developed for specific communities such as black youth that are experiencing discrimination. Efforts must be made to encourage them to stay in school and find meaningful employment.
Jobs and other economic opportunities are essential if at risk young people are to avoid a life of crime. This investment in prevention will be returned several times over if people are kept out of jail. Funds must be found for extensive youth programs that provide meaningful jobs for at risk young people. This can be done through existing community programs such as help for the aged, home repair, recreation programs and other community based programs. As well, there needs to be more extensive internship programs that move young people into jobs, and apprenticeship and trade training programs must change to encourage young people to enter these fields.
A comprehensive youth crime prevention program must be developed in the schools. Special funds should be made available in poor communities to provide additional teachers, youth workers, school lunch programs and special tutoring programs. The education system remains the fundamental social institution that works with young people and its mandate must be expanded to deal with a wide variety of social issues
Finally, it is time that Canadians mounted an effective program to eliminate poverty through full employment programs and a tax system that effectively redistributes income. Crime is almost always the result of poverty and if that root cause is not tackled then the rates of crime will remain much too high.