Adding it up

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 1:31 PM - 26 Comments

Bruce Cheadle takes apart a recent study that questioned Statistics Canada’s crime data.

Newark asserts that “many of the most common conclusions that are drawn about crime in Canada are in fact incorrect or badly distorted.” ”Serious violent crime is increasing,” the former executive officer of the Canadian Police Association flatly asserts.

While Newark’s report for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute was given prominent coverage by both the Globe and Mail and National Post newspapers, the wider academic community that relies on the data was not consulted. Their reviews are scathing. ”It’s really badly done. It’s embarrassing, actually,” said Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 1:31 PM - 109 Comments

Mike Moffatt considers how much it would cost to increase the lithium levels in drinking water, and how much might be gained as a result.

The city of Toronto has 3.3 murders/100,000 people (Source).  A 30% reduction in this rate would lower it by 1 murder per year per 100,000 people.  If our rough back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct and the lithium carbonate method works like the Texas study suggests, $153,000 buys us one less murder.  That does not take into account the reductions in rapes, suicides, drug use or thefts.

Will it work?  I don’t know.  It seems like it would be worthy a pilot study or two. Although those levels of elemental lithium are believed to be safe, there may be side-effects we are not considering.  There are ethical considerations as well, but it is hard to make a case that adding fluoride to the water supply is ethical but lithium is not – and we’ve been adding fluoride to drinking water for over half a century.

Look south

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 4:44 PM - 62 Comments

Conservative backbencher Brent Rathgeber looks to the United States, seemingly to explain his government’s approach to crime.

answer to Mark Holland’s challenge to name a “single jurisdiction where higher rates of incarceration led to a lower crime rate”-easy–USA.

from 1988 to 2008, fed and state prisoner pop from 1M to 2.3M–violent crime cut in 1/2 and overall crime rate down 25% (NY Times 2/3/2009).

That drop in the crime rate is noted in a New York Times piece from March 2, 2009—a piece based on a Pew Center study that raised concerns about the fact that correctional spending in the United States was “outpacing budget growth in education, transportation and public assistance.”

Of course, it is difficult to draw a direct line between the incarceration rate and the crime rate (see this chat with Pew’s Susan K. Urahn and her comparison of Florida and New York). Were it so easy, one might imagine that the United States, with the highest incarceration rate in the world, would now be the most peaceful.

When the Economist looked at the American justice system last year, it noted some of the research and thinking in this regard. Continue…

Statistics if necessary, but not necessarily statistics

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 3:17 PM - 12 Comments

Rob Moore considers the slightly rising crime rate in New Brunswick.

“The data shows we still have a lot of room for improvement and, even more importantly, our justice system can do better.”

Objectionable reality

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 7:48 PM - 41 Comments

Having said the same thing this time last year, the Justice Minister restates his thesis on crime.

“We don’t govern on the latest statistics,” the minister told The Canadian Press in a telephone interview. ”What level it’s at right now, it’s unacceptable, and we are committed to disrupting … criminal activity.”

It was a year and a half ago, having heard the Prime Minister say something similar, that Dan Gardner was inspired to pen the phrase “an epistemological claim of staggering primitiveness.”

'Your personal experiences and impressions are wrong'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 1:18 PM - 98 Comments

Stephen Harper, June 6, 2008. Ladies and gentlemen, I try to get off of Parliament Hill as often as possible to attend functions like this. It helps me to keep in touch with the issues that really matter to Canadians, and one issue I hear about time and time again, whether it’s among Canadians old or young, whether it’s in the East or West, in English or in French, is unacceptably high levels of crime. Everywhere I go I hear the same refrain: “Prime Minister, please crack down on criminals, get guns, gangs and drugs off our streets, stop behaviour that threatens our property and our persons, make our communities safer.” It’s a reasonable thing to ask of government. It’s one of the most fundamental reasons, maybe the most fundamental reason, the government exists, especially in Canada, a country that was founded on the principle of peace, order and good government … It’s one thing that they, the criminals do not get it, but if you don’t mind me saying, another part of the problem for the past generation has been those, also a small part of our society, who are not criminals themselves, but who are always making excuses for them, and when they aren’t making excuses, they are denying that crime is even a problem: the ivory tower experts, the tut-tutting commentators, the out-of-touch politicians. “Your personal experiences and impressions are wrong,” they say. “Crime is not really a problem.” I don’t know how you say that. I don’t know how you tell that to the families of the victims we saw on the screen today. These men, women and children are not statistics. They had families, friends, hopes and dreams, until their lives were taken from them … Obviously we cannot undo these travesties, nor can we erase the pain and suffering that they cause. But there is something we can do and that we must do, and that is to get serious about tackling crime in this country … What we’re doing, ladies and gentlemen, is starting to overhaul a system that’s been in place. In fact, we’re starting to overhaul a system that has been moving in the wrong direction for 30 years.

Statistics Canada, today. Police-reported crime in Canada continued to decline in 2008. Both the traditional crime rate and the new Crime Severity Index fell 5%, meaning that both the volume of police-reported crime and its severity decreased. Violent crime also dropped, but to a lesser extent. This was the fifth consecutive annual decline in police-reported crime.

Bazaar ‘steal’ almost lands buyer in jail

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, November 24, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

No wonder Saskatchewan has the highest crime rate in the country. While countless drug dealers, car thieves and cold-blooded murderers roam the streets unpunished, some provincial prosecutors have decided to crack down on people like Nicole Marchand—whose only offence was shopping at a garage sale.

Two summers ago, the Prince Albert woman paid $20 for a used digital camera she found at a neighbourhood bazaar (Marchand also bought three “Last Supper” paintings and a few pairs of pants). The price tag was such a steal, she later testified, that she “grabbed it” before anyone else had the chance.

Later that August, however, Marchand was short of money and desperate for groceries. So she pawned her new camera and its red carrying case, promising the broker behind the counter that she would buy it back as soon as she mustered up enough cash.

In the meantime, though, police officers conducting a routine check of local pawnshops discovered that the camera had been snatched during a home invasion a few weeks before the yard sale. Marchand was promptly charged with possession of stolen property and hauled into court, where she faced a possible two-year jail sentence. Simply put, the Crown claimed that the defendant should have known her bargain-basement purchase was the proceeds of crime. And if not, she should have at least been suspicious enough to ask where the camera came from before handing over her $20 bill.

“It’s ridiculous,” says her court-appointed lawyer, Peter Burns. “It’s obvious that this trial should not have taken place.”

The judge agreed. After a half-day of testimony, Justice Stephen Carter ruled that Marchand did nothing illegal. He also highlighted one important fact that prosecutors seemed to overlook (or at least ignore): when police seized the camera from the pawnshop, the memory card still contained Marchand’s photographs of her grandchildren. “If she was pawning a camera she suspected was stolen,” the judge asked, “why leave her personal photos on it?”