The Scourge of Phantom Crime

Readers of this blog may know that I place a great deal of stock in critical thinking. Although I am sure that I stray from it on a regular basis, to be a consistent critical thinker is the ideal toward which I strive. It is therefore disheartening, though hardly surprising, that an internal memo circulated Sunday to Conservative Members of Parliament gives insight into a Harper political agenda that seems largely predicated on contempt for the electorate.

An article in today's Star entitled Crime crackdown tops Harper agenda reveals, to no one's surprise, that the Fall parliamentary session is to be dominated by law and order legislation:

While it’s not known for sure what measures will be in the legislation, they could include adult sentences for youths convicted of serious crimes, expanded surveillance powers for police, curbing house arrest for property crimes and ending pardons for serious crimes.

Not to be deterred by the fact of falling crime rates, the government has an interesting, but hardly novel way to justify its promise of more incarceration time for more Canadians, who will need to be quartered in the new prisons that will be built at a cost of over $6 billion:

"Quite simply, people are not reporting to the police that they are a victim of crime,” the memo says. “More needs to be done.”

The key word in the above excerpt is simply, which, in my view, reveals how the Harper government looks at issues, never allowing hard data to get in the way of its ideological imperatives. However, what I do resent is the assumption about the citizens of Canada implicit in such an assertion. Clearly, we are perceived as lacking either the fortitude or the intelligence to collectively challenge groundless claims about issues like phantom crime.

Time will tell whether they are correct in making that assumption.

Canada’s crime rate at lowest level in almost 40 years: StatsCan

Thus reads the headline in a story posted online by The Globe and Mail.

Amongst the latest Statistics Canada findings, the following facts are worth noting:

There were 554 homicides in 2010, down 56 from the year before. The decline in the homicide rate was largely driven by a decrease in British Columbia, where the rate hit an all-time low.
There were 693 attempted murders last year, down from 801 in 2009. This resulted in the lowest level in more than 30 years.

Nearly 93,000 vehicles were reported stolen last year, representing a 15 per cent drop and continuing a downward trend that started in the mid-1990s.

Nearly 153,000 youth between the ages of 12 and 17 were accused of a crime in 2010, almost 15,000 fewer than a year earlier. The youth crime rate declined by 7 per cent.

Three cities had increases in their crime severity index, which measures the seriousness of crimes: St. John’s, Sudbury, Ont., and Peterborough, Ont. The cities with the lowest crime severity indexes were Guelph, Ont., Quebec City, Toronto and Ottawa.

Of course, before we make the mistake of feeling reasonably safe, I suspect the Harper regime will remind us of the 'fact' of unreported crime lurking beneath the statistics like a great white shark trolling offshore for the unsuspecting - that is, if they even bother to comment after having achieved a majority in the last election with their wealth of scare tactics.