You may have seen Mayor Larry heralding the news that Ottawa’s crime rate fell 5% last year. He certainly seems pleased with himself about it.
In fact, the crime rate has been trending downwards since 1991. It’s not a result of anything Mayor Larry has done, it’s the result of demographic shifts in the population. The chief perpetrators of crime are young males. As the population ages, there are proportionately fewer young males and therefore the crime rate drops. It’s a well-documented and predictable thing.
Public perceptions of crime, however, have not accurately reflected this downwards trend in crime. For many years, the public has believed that crime is increasing.
An interesting phenomenon is that while an aging population will experience a decline in crime, it will also experience more fear of crime, since exaggerated fear of crime is more prevalent among vulnerable populations such as the elderly.
Combine this with the fact that Conservative politicians at all levels like to stoke public fears about crime. If you can convince the population that there’s a threat, public opinion will support your calls for more police, more prisons, more laws, more social control.
Television also helps to feed the problem. A very high proportion of TV dramas are about crime. Average everyday crime is too mundane and unthreatening to make good TV material. Even serious crimes would get boring after awhile, so the entertainment industry has to continually out-do itself with ever more sensationalized crime stories. As a result, TV watchers are subjected to a steady diet of more deviant and chilling crimes over time, and they begin to internalize this distorted version of reality. They begin to believe that increasingly horrific acts are being perpetrated by increasingly deviant sociopaths against increasingly high numbers of innocent victims.
Exaggerated fear of crime is contagious. If all of your neighbours are afraid to go out after dark, and if nobody allows their children to walk to school unattended, you’re likely to believe your neighbourhood is dangerous and predators lie in ambush, even if your own experience and empirical evidence suggest otherwise.
The solution to the escalating fears?
The conservative mayor promises to crack down on crime and hire more cops, and the Conservative prime minister promises to get tough on crime and build more prisons and introduce more mandatory minimum sentences. “The party’s over,” they say, as if crime has been flourishing unchecked under more liberal leadership.
It’s all just another example of ideology trumping evidence.
Nevertheless, a lot of people eat it up because finally someone has the balls to crack down on crime and do something about a problem they believe to be spiralling out of control and destroying the very foundation of society.
Meanwhile, this is what the crime rate has been doing for the last forty-five years:
If you lok at just violent crime, the picture’s even rosier:
It gets expensive to build expensive solutions to imaginary problems, especially when real problems are growing because they’re being ignored.
(More crime statistics are available from the Statistics Canada Daily from July 17, 2008.)
TAGS:
the 5% crime rate fall doesn’t get me that excited, I just found out that that sex offender that didn’t want to move to Brockville, just moved a couple streets down from me. This sucks.
J, your response helps to illustrate my point. Does it cheer you up to know that the rate of sexual assault dropped 23% in the last 10 years?
Bruce Schneier has written many interesting pieces on this general theme:
Refuse to be Terrorized (Aug 24 2006)
CCTV Doesn’t Keep Us Safe, Yet the Cameras Are Everywhere (Jun 26 2008)
Privatizing the Police Puts Us at Greater Risk (Feb 27 2007)
Unchecked Police And Military Power Is A Security Threat (Jun 24 2004)
Complete list
Harper’s solution to falling crime rates is to make more things illegal – C61 will criminalize all those boomers who dare to copy their CD collection onto their computer! Gotta keep those crime rates up! Interesting solution to the lack of retirement/nursing home beds – put those boomers in those emptying prison beds!
Oh and whose brilliant idea is it to criminalize natural medicine and herbs – put those boomers in jail for drinking echanacea tea!
Low crime is always a good thing! (Everything I needed to learn I learned from playing SimCity!) Would you believe Toronto has been trying to pass itself off as the safest city in Canada? You wouldn’t know it from watching the news these days.
Are those stats Canada-only? Interesting, because I remember reading Freakonomics where the author showed exactly the same trent in the United States, but attributing the peak and fall-off to the Roe vs. Wade decision to legalise abortion in 1973. He said that the sudden lack of babies being born to poor mothers who would otherwise grow up into a life of crime showed up in statistics 18 years later. If it’s the same for Canada, where Roe vs. Wade isn’t a factor, what’s to explain it?
That darn StatsCan. Peeing in the political pool. Again.
Milan, thanks for the links!
Deb – I agree. The conservative politicians take advantage of fear of crime to exert more social control and create more laws. More laws = more crime. Unfortunately, they’re also building more prisons, and if the US is any indication, prisons definitely fall into that “build it and they will come” model.
Chris – I used to play SimCity a lot too. But when it comes to understanding crime, SimCity is a little SimPlistic.
Ian – interesting stuff. THe stats are Canadian-only. I think they got it wrong in Freakonomics. The assumption is that the aborted fetuses would have become criminals because they were more likely to have grown up poor, right? And the other assumption is that poor women are more likely to get abortions than non-poor women. I’m not sure that either of these assumptions are correct. Even if they are, the fact that the demographic bulge of young males coincides with increased crime rates in countries other than the US, regardless of their laws and views on abortion, indicates that it’s a bigger factor than abortion.
Coyote – Statscan has this nasty habit of contaminating ideology with facts. The Conservatives should probably axe the whole department. 😉
[…] has been improving dramatically over the last couple of years. But clearly people’s perceptions are at odds with the statistics, because they were adamant that things are getting […]