Social Policy in Ontario

Crime rates have more to do with social factors than number of police officers

Posted on April 2, 2023 in Child & Family Debates

Source: TheStar.com — Authors: John Sewell

TheStar.com – Opinion/Contributors
April 1, 2023.   By John Sewell, Contributor

One pervasive urban myth is that more police officers will mean there will be less crime.

Premier Doug Ford embraced this myth as his response to recent violent incidents on the TTC, stating we need more police officers in Toronto to deal with these incidents. But there is no evidence to support this statement. Evidence suggests that rates of crime have nothing whatsoever to do with the number of police officers.

Here’s the data from Statistics Canada, which compiles the data supplied by police across the country. It uses the term “severe crime” as something which involves a prison sentence to differentiate it from lesser crimes. In Winnipeg there are 184 officers for every 100,000 residents and the rate of severe crime is 113 persons for every 100,000 residents. Toronto has fewer officers — 167/100,000 and the rate of severe crime is less, just 45/100,000.

Halifax has 210 officers/100,000, with severe crime at 66/100,000. Vancouver, 198 officers/100,000, with severe crime at 81 residents/100,000. And so it goes: other Canadian cities have more police officers per capita than Toronto but they also have higher rates of severe crime.

As criminologist David Bayley writes “(The fact that the rate of crime has little to do with the number of officers) is certainly not something the police themselves want to emphasize. Their livelihood depends on the public’s belief that the number of cops matter. Nor are politicians anxious to cast doubt on the efficacy of policing. If hiring more police won’t help, then what will? The finding that the number of police is unrelated to crime rates is very threatening. It leaves us all without a security blanket.”

Crime rates have much more to do with social factors than with the numbers of police officers — rates of social inequality, availability of affordable housing, support for families and young children, and so forth.

There was a famous study done in Kansas City in the 1970s which shook the police world. The study looked at three neighbourhoods, first documenting the rates of crime and public feelings about personal security.

In one neighbourhood police patrol rates were kept constant, with a police car travelling the streets every hour or so. In a second neighbourhood, police patrols were doubled, happening every half-hour or so. In the third neighbourhood, there were no patrols: police only responded with calls for service.

The study then re-surveyed those three neighbourhoods and found two conclusions: there was no difference in the crime rates and there was no difference in public feelings of personal security. Police presence had made no difference on rates of crime or feeling of personal security. Sadly, police services have never stopped doing patrols: two third of the time spent by Toronto police officers is spent on patrol, and that is mirrored in most other police forces in Canada.

Another way to look at random crime is the common sense approach: it is impossible to put a police officer on every bus, streetcar and subway car in the hope that crime can be prevented. No government has the money to make that happen and no transit service could ever hire that many private police officers.

The only way to reduce random crime is to address the root causes of it, usually defined by social indicators: inequality, affordable housing, programs for young children and families. The provincial and federal governments are the only public institutions with the financial capability of addressing these issues, but as we have seen in the recently released budgets of both Queen’s Park and Ottawa, they seem uninterested in doing so. Instead they rely on the urban myth that more cops equals less crime.

John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2023/04/01/crime-rates-have-more-to-do-with-social-factors-than-number-of-police-officers.html

Tags: budget, crime prevention, housing, ideology, poverty

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