posted on March 1, 2010 in For the Record | Be the First to Comment | Print

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The headline in one of my community newspapers said it all: Low Murder Rate [an] Anomaly: Cops. It was a classic case of not letting facts get in the way of a good story.

My local police chief wanted to assure us that just because we’ve only had three murders since 2008, it’s bound to get worse. And so the deployment of some homicide officers to the traffic division is, he promised, only temporary.

The boring facts are that in Ontario, where I live, there were 176 homicides in 2008. That same year, nearly twice as many people (320) were killed on the province’s highways.

But here’s the bit that seems to have eluded my local chief. A year before, 451 people died on Ontario’s highways. The nearly 30 per cent reduction in deaths was due in great measure to enhanced highway policing: more officers doing a better job.

I don’t know the precise reasons that my regional top cop is worried that there are so few murders, but it certainly goes along with the current federal government’s obsession with crime and punishment issues.

The Prime Minister has made being “tough on crime” a major party platform. And it’s one of the Tories’ defences for proroguing Parliament, so Conservatives could be appointed to the Senate where the Liberal-dominated chamber has been allegedly soft on crime and delaying legislation from the Commons.

Lest you be concerned that I have the Tories in my sights, let me assure you that I find the opposition equally culpable for their complete inability to challenge the government’s manufactured fear with some simple facts.

To wit: In 2006, the most recent year for statistics I could find, the crime rate was the lowest in 25 years, and it’s been in general decline since 1991. Not only is the crime rate falling, the crime severity rate is also falling. Homicides constitute a fraction of a per cent of all crime while nearly half of all crimes in Canada are property related.

Only about 20 per cent of all reported crimes are violent, and fewer than one per cent of those are homicides.

About a quarter of all police-reported crimes involve family violence. Half of those are committed by spouses or common-law partners.

You see a picture here. Canada is becoming a safer place to live by the year. Fewer and fewer people are committing crimes. So why does the federal government want to put more people in jail for longer periods of time?

Why, when research shows that the chances of a person recommitting a crime are hugely reduced by rehabilitation and restoration to society does the government want to spend huge amounts of our taxes to build more prisons and incarcerate people at the cost of about $80,000 a year per inmate?

Canada already has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. The folly of which is demonstrated by looking south where the United States, with the highest incarceration rate in the West, has a higher crime rate than Canada.

Plain and simple: Jail doesn’t work.

But it gets worse. A recent international Angus Reid poll suggests that Canadians are buying this tough on crime nonsense. It found that 62 per cent of Canadians favoured the death penalty for murder. The figure was 67 per cent in Britain and 84 per cent in the U.S.

Where is this fear coming from? We know that harsher punishment does not deter most would-be criminals. And we know that restorative justice has a far more positive impact on convicts than retributive justice.

It’s pretty clear where Jesus stood. (Not that Christians haven’t used tortured logic to ignore his words for centuries.) If his message about a God of mercy and love and restoring the sinner isn’t enough, there’s always Matthew 5:38, 39: “You have heard it said: “And eye for an eye … but I say to you … turn the other cheek.”

Put it another way. God made a promise to Noah that he wouldn’t get tough on sinners anymore. If God can be soft, so can we.

Christians in Canada clearly have their work cut out if they want to overcome increasing political and populist thuggery.