Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave
nationalpost.com
nationalpost.com
The very first link in the article from StatsCan is "Canada's crime rate: Two decades of decline". It says the opposite of what the NP article is quoting it for.
This misquotation is followed by a series of anectodes, and backed up by the intellectual weight of... an opinion survey.
The multiple of anecdote is not "data".
The correct title for this article is "people believe there is an increase in crime", for which articles like this is the reason.
Turns out the main suspect is another tech guy who probably did that. Not a homeless criminal and not fault of these "progressive policies". Crickets, no one walks back all the terrible things they said.
The fact is a person was stabbed to death and was begging people for help. Why didn't they help? Maybe because people pushed it into their head that it's all crime and that we shouldn't help strangers. Yes. Homeless people in SF are sometimes scary as hell, I know and I don't blame the people who didn't help. But adults discuss facts and reach conclusions based on factual detail. Not based on fitting into ones political narrative.
I fear that this is only the start of a worsening trend.
Relationships between poverty and violent crime, specifically children growing up in poor households, have been well known for a very long time and the relationship continues to be shown repeatedly. See e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS2468-2...
> I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said "I saw something once, so the entire history of collected statistics must be wrong" I'd be very rich. It happens in China too. See for instance https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The only real questions are about specific actionable causes and why crime can still go up even when overall average poverty goes down.
On the other hand, crime went down a lot, across the board, in 2009 despite the recession. <https://newrepublic.com/article/80316/relationship-poverty-c...>
West Virginia, among the poorest of US states, has a crime rate well below average.
"Your honor, I was so broke that I raped someone"
Also, the specific connection with crime and poverty inequality, not poverty itself.
Honduras is a good example. It was once poor and relatively peaceful. With a few social incidents, like removing farmers from their land and the rise of the drug trade, you have violence. The drug trade displays wealthy narcos to young men whose other choice is to be a poor laborer. The men see that those with money get the girls, can support their families, have status.
In my experience, especially in South America, the twin forces of poverty and civic dysfunction produce desperation - and that seems the driving force behind the sorts of “crime in the streets” that gets headlines.
Of course in other places on the same continent corruption (narco, mining, logging, etc) produce violent crime that plays out quite differently.
I've read of accounts by two different Western women who hitchhiked alone across China in perfect safety. One cannot imagine this happening in any other BRICS country except maybe parts of pre-Ukraine War Russia.
That's interesting, any data to back it up? The article suggests the problem is due to a 2018 change in the law that prevents arresting and jailing people for bail and parole violations.
You're probably not wrong, I believe all of these things are likely to be factors.
> Violent crime has technically been worse in Canada,
Technically worse? (Is that the best kind of worse?).
They literally just lied in the headline.
> They spent a fair bit of time on a survey where most people said they thought crime was worse.
The "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd care a lot about feelings when those feelings are about crime.
I think "historically worse" is what they were after. If they said it's worse than ever, that would be technically incorrect even though it might be true of the last 30 years.
Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct - the best kind of correct. I hereby promote you to grade 37
edit: i mean parent comment is referencing Futurama, not the article.
It may well be related to the catch and release policy with repeat offenders. Criminals are going back onto the street and committing crimes again and laughing at the police when they get arrested. That unsurprisingly will lead to more crime, but if it leads to more violence is also not established by the article. We’ve seen these kinds of policies all over in liberal strongholds in the US and Canada, and it seems insane to me. I spent three months in Manhattan and it was eye opening. I had to ask someone to come unlock the toothpaste at Walgreens. Another time I went to target to buy ground beef, only to discover they’d just been robbed of all of their meat. I live in the developing world, where there is real poverty, and high levels of violent crime, but I’ve never seen anything like that.
If people want to say this is a hard problem to solve then fine but a bit tired of government and news organizations acting obtuse like they just can't figure out what the problem is.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65047436
On an individual level, I'm sure most immigrants are fine people. But there's a social cost to rapidly increasing the population too much, too fast without also increasing the amount of housing and other resources to take care of people and integrate them culturally into a country.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/04/the-canada-exp...
In Saskatchewan, First Nations leaders are sounding the alarm on a “crisis” of on-reserve violence.Important to this discussion is that I'm not necessarily saying that recent immigrants are committing a disproportionate share of crimes. I'm just pointing out that a rapid growth necessarily stretches social resources everywhere which might have an effect on crime overall.
If you have loads of new people and housing costs are X% higher because of that for instance, I'm sure that fact alone can have some impact on people who are on the edge of deciding that crime might be worth it because they can't earn an acceptable quality of life otherwise.
> The article says that the spike in violence has even affected First Nations:
These aren't like some isolated monastic communities with literally zero interaction with the outside world, are they? Unless these communities are completely isolated with literally zero interaction with the outside world, it seems logical to think that a lack of social resources and negative effects in the rest of Canada at least indirectly impacts them as well.
I see. The reason I thought that is that you wrote that immigrants haven’t been culturally integrated which seemed in this context as if you meant that they were the perpetrators.
Do you know if areas with more immigration have seen a larger increase in violence? Indirect effects through housing should be correlated with that.
2) I'd welcome reading any links on what you said, albeit with a healthy bit of skepticism as bad statistical interpretations are very common in this domain.
I am not an expert on immigration, nor on crime. From what I have heard, in the US, immigrants have a lower crime rate than US-born citizens. This 2018 review article says that this negative relationship is weak:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-crimin...
I don't know what research was done in the 5 years since.
Personally, i notice that the sudden rise in crime happened almost exactly at the same time as the fact that rents jumped out of reach for many people.
The fact that the spike in random violence appeared at the same time tent cities did should be obvious to anyone.
It seems likely that a mentally unwell man is far more likely to stab somebody on the subway when that's the place he spends all day to stay warm since the homeless shelters are full.
Bingo. But if you accept this as causation than fault lies in at the feet of an inept government and central bank and not the individuals stressed to the max by a society built to ensure zero social mobility and widening wealth inequality.
This is the fruit of NIMBYism, same as in California.
As for the CBC, while they're quite progressive, they bog down their political coverage under so much boring trivial cultural stuff that it's basically unlistenable.
If an asteroid were flying towards the earth, Postmedia would blame Trudeau, the Star would blame Harper, and CBC would be airing a detailed history of the nose-flute in the Philippines.
CBC is the outlier however as it is consistently Liberal supporting.
Half their webpage is dedicated to weed smoking and its lifestyle.
The only actual trend of significance that has meaningful data behind it is an increase in police killings, which is still presented in a mostly useless way (8 over the last 6 months vs 133 from 1961-2009).
Everything else seems to be one-off stats like "a 53-percent spike last week".
Not surprising that this is in the Post, and from what I can see of this author, he's a better dressed version of Rebel Media.
Instead, they constantly preach independence and housing as investment. Social programs are just patches for underlying cultural and economical problems. Also, you don't bring more people to a broken home.
The National Post is owned by PostMedia, Canada's right-wing Borglike media conglomerate, which also owns the other major papers -- except the Toronto Star, which has only been owned by right wing businessmen since 2020.
Kinda reminds me of when American media blames the President for conditions which pertain worldwide, in that the point of the article isn't to "relate the news", it's to advance a domestic agenda; in Canada's case, "time to switch to the Blue Neoliberals so we can finish privatizing healthcare!"
Could every sinking country have something in common... like being a Western country?
Why would a trend of increasing crimerate reverse if you cut police funding "more than slightly"?
When people can work a full time job and still not afford to support themselves you can’t act surprised when crime increases.
Imagine my surprise that years of ACAB and calls to defund the police would lead slain officers. It's depressing to me as a Canadian that we allow what's happening in the US to drag us down; I think our country can do a lot better than that type of discourse.
I don't agree with ACAB but I also don't think enough departments are doing enough to clean house despite the light that body cams are beginning to shine on these previously-hidden practices.
Bullies have taken over and their intellectual allies are enabling them. We're watching this play out all across the net and in media.
I don't know what the overarching meta narrative or cause of all this is. My best guess is that it's the natural course of events or emergent behaviour when politeness trumps everything.