Issue in Depth: Crime and the Police

One of the five priorities of the new Harper Conservative government is getting tough on crime. Their solution is more police on the streets and mandatory sentences for violent crime with guns.

This policy, written in the midst of an election campaign, was designed to attract middle-class voters who have an exaggerated fear of crime. The news headlines played into those fears. Over the last year gun violence in Toronto resulted in a number of young black men being killed, and when a teenaged girl was shot in broad daylight on Yonge Street in the midst of the election all hell broke loose in the press. The message was that crime was out of control and something had to be done about it. The politicians, trolling for votes, responded by promising they would be tough on crime.

But is it true that crime is out of control? The reality is that crime, even violent crime, has been dropping for several years. Here are some facts taken from Statistics Canada. Violent crime dropped from 2001 to 2004. The homicide rate has increased slightly in the same period but the attempted murder rate decreased. Sexual assaults dropped and all sexual offences decreased between 2001 and 2004. Property crimes dropped. This includes break and enter, theft and robbery, but motor vehicle thefts rose slightly. Drug offences went up slightly.

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 seems to be 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 have little confidence that the police will defend them.

But will getting tough on crime and mandatory sentences solve the problem? That seems highly unlikely. In the United States similar policies have led to the incarceration of large numbers of young black men. Jails are institutions where inmates learn how to become criminals and take on a criminal identity that can lead 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 middle class and as a result far fewer tax dollars go to lower income kids than those from middle and upper income home. (That 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. It was a combination of putting more police on the streets, a community policing program and a “youth jobs” program.

The youth jobs program was to be a public/private sector effort and some things have been accomplished. The TTC will hire 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.

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.

• Police must adopt community based policing methods that take officers out of their cars and into the neighbourhoods. Special efforts should be made for neighbourhood police to work with young people.

• The police must 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.

• The drug trade must be dealt with in a more comprehensive way. We need new laws legalizing 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. The best way to do that is high visibility surveillance. Two police cars parked outside a suspected shooting gallery can do wonders in decreasing the drug trade.)

• Funds must be found for extensive youth programs that provide meaningful jobs. This can be done through community programs such as help for the aged, home repair, recreation programs and other community based programs.

• Special programs must be developed for specific communities such as black youth that are experiencing discrimination. Efforts must be encourage them to stay in school and to find meaningful employment.