Day's interpretation of statistics is a crime

By Paula Simons, Edmonton Journal

 

Stockwell Day is worried. He'd like you to be worried too. Sure, Statistics Canada figures show that crime, including serious violent crime, is down across Canada. But "unreported crime," says Day, is on the rise, at what he calls an alarming rate.

 

That, he says, is why the Conservative government is pushing ahead with its anti-crime agenda, which includes plans to increase sentences for a wide range of off ences, and to build new prisons to accommodate more prisoners. Various estimates have put the cost of building and operating those prisons at between $5 billion and $9 billion.

 

Of course, since "unreported crime" is, by its nature unrecorded, it's hard to know if rates are going up or down. Since Day's comments at a press conference Tuesday, his defenders have rushed to point to a 2004 Statistics Canada National Victimization Survey, which estimated that only 34 per cent of criminal incidents came to the attention of police, down from 37 per cent in 1999. Numbers for 2009 are due to be released late next month. Though they're not yet public, it's possible that Day, as president of the Treasury Board, has seen them and was obliquely referring to them.

 

But even if it were true that more Canadians aren't reporting crime -- either because the incidents are so petty, they don't bother, or because they're afraid of retribution or family breakdown -- it's hard to see how tougher sentences and more prisons would help. How, after all, do you prosecute or jail someone for a crime that was never reported?

 

Despite the Conservatives' best efforts to whip Canadians into a frenzy about rising crime rates, facts point the other way. Let's take homicide -- a crime which rarely goes unreported. According to Statistics Canada, homicide rates are down across the country. Quebec and New Brunswick are reporting their lowest homicide rates in 40 years. Montreal saw fewer murders last year than any year since 1981. Alberta experienced the single largest drop in homicides in Canada, with 15 fewer murders in 2009 than 2008.

 

According to Statistics Canada, the crime rate, a measure of the volume of crime actually reported to police, fell three per cent in 2009 and was 17 per cent lower than a decade ago. Meanwhile, the Crime Severity Index, which Stats Can uses to measure of the seriousness of police-reported crime, declined four per cent in 2009 and stood 22 per cent lower than in 1999.

 

Perhaps, like the Conservatives, you don't trust Statistics Canada? Maybe data direct from your own Edmonton Police Service will convince you.

 

"It's really exciting," says John Warden, manager of business performance for EPS. "It's a really positive story for Edmonton. Statistics can be dismissed as "just a bunch of numbers" -- but we're talking about life and death, about people's homes and cars."

 

In the first six months of 2010, says Warden, assaults in Edmonton were down by four per cent compared to the same time last year, while robberies were down 23 per cent. The theft of vehicles was down 28 per cent, while housebreaking was down by nine per cent.

 

Part of the decline can probably be attributed to economics and demographics -- with the manic boom subsiding, it's probably not that surprising to see crime tapering off this year. But Warden says this isn't just a one-year blip. In 1991, he notes, Edmonton's break-and-enter rate was 1,600 per 100,000. Today's rate, he says, is just 600 per 100,000.

 

"By anybody's math, that's a pretty significant reduction," says Warden. "It means Edmontonians are safer in their homes. It just does."

 

Yet despite all the local and national data, the Conservative fearmongering continues. On Wednesday, the day after Day's comments on unreported crime, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced plans to attack organized crime by reclassifying a large number of minor crimes as "serious offences." While most Canadians would agree gang crime is bad, I fear we could go too far by recategorizing such acts as bookmaking, betting, and "cheating while playing a game" as "serious offences" under the Criminal Code.

 

The United States has spent two decades experimenting with the same "tough on crime" philosophy the Harper Conservatives now espouse. The results have been economically and socially disastrous.

 

In South Carolina, for example, the state adopted tough new "truth in sentencing" laws in the mid-1990s. From 1983 to 2008, spending on prisons went up 600 per cent, while the number of prisoners soared from 9,000 to almost 25,000.

 

In California, according to data from the Pew Center on the States, more than 755,000 people are either in prison or on parole; the state spends almost $10 billion US a year on corrections, helping to drive it into financial meltdown.

 

Over all, spending on corrections in America has jumped from $11 billion US 20 years ago to $50 billion US today. One out of every 100 adult Americans is in jail, and one in 31 is on probation or parole. As the respected conservative magazine The Economist put it last week, "Never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little."

 

Why the Harper Conservatives would want to adopt such a tragically failed social and fiscal strategy beggars understanding.

 

"We don't govern on the basis of statistics," Nicholson told reporters Wednesday.

 

Of course not. Why pay attention to facts, to evidence, or to logic, if they don't support your pet ideological agenda?

 

It's so much more exciting to fight a phantom menace like unreported crime -- than to come up with common-sense solutions to keep Canadians safe and secure, without sacking the treasury.