In the search for answers after the Scarborough shooting, the message from Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was clear: more police officers would mean less violent crime.
But the story painted by crime statistics released on Tuesday is murkier.
Canada’s overall crime rate (violent and non-violent) has been decreasing as police presence increases, but the relationship between police strength and crime rates varies between Canadian cities.
“There are many examples of cities that have a very high number of police officers per capita and high crime rates and there are examples of cities that have low numbers of police per capita that have low crime rates,” said University of Toronto criminologist Scot Wortley.
It’s a relationship that has been thrust into the spotlight as politicians search for a way to respond to a rash of gun violence in Canada’s largest city.
Some are focused on community programs, others on gun control, but Ford wants more police officers.
“Five million dollars will hire a lot of officers. It would make the city a lot safer and we would get these guns and gangs off our streets,” he said on Monday, before asking Premier Dalton McGuinty for cash to hire police officers.
Instead, McGuinty pledged $5 million to continue the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS), which sends police into at-risk neighbourhoods to make arrests and build relationships with community members.
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Strong police presence can coincide with high violent crime rates: statistics
Even if Ford was able to hire more police officers, the numbers released by Statistics Canada suggest there is no guarantee lower crime rates would follow.
The report shows that the two Canadian cities with the highest proportion of police officers had the highest rates of violent crimes, including murder, sex assault, assault, firearms offences, robbery and kidnapping.
Even with a police presence of 200 officers per 100,000 people, Saint John, N.B. posted the highest rate of police-reported violent crime of census metropolitan areas in 2011.
Similarly, Thunder Bay, Ont. ranked third on the rate of violent crime and on the rate of police per capita with 190 officers per citizen.
Kelowna, B.C. and Moncton, N.B. were among cities with the faintest police presence, and both had relatively high rates of violent crimes in 2011. Saguenay, Que., on the other hand, has relatively few police, and ranked low when it came to violent crimes.
As for Toronto, which has been rocked by a spate of gun violence in recent months, there is a relatively high proportion of police officers and a low proportion of violent crimes at just 876 per 100,000.
The diversity lends support to what many criminologists have been arguing for decades: police presence is only one ingredient in reducing crime rates.
“The police have very little to do with the true causes of crime,” Wortley said. “If crime is caused by social conditions, inequality, poverty, unemployment, youth hopelessness, poor parenting, police have nothing to do with that.”
Wortley said it is unfair to expect more police to decrease the crime rate in the face of its deep-rooted societal causes.
Methods, not manpower, matters: experts
While the number of police officers won’t automatically decrease the crime rate, what they do can have a major impact.
“If you properly use a relatively small number of police officers, you may have a bigger impact on crime than improperly using a large number of officers,” Wortley said.
It’s an approach dubbed “smart policing,” by University of Ottawa criminologist Irvin Waller.
Waller said that two-thirds of all policing dollars go into responding to 9-1-1 calls – a ratio that should be rebalanced into tackling the roots of crime.
“Smart policing means you are focusing on the underlying problem and you are taking police resources off reactive response and using them to solve, if they can, those problems,” he said.
The approach is already being used in Prince Albert, Sask. where the local police are joining with community services to share information.
The pilot project, which began in September, is focused on finding the underlying problems, who is impacted by them and how to end them.
Smart policing reduced crime rates by 70 per cent in Boston, Mass., during the 1990s, and more recently Glasgow, Scotland cut its rate by 50 per cent, Waller said.
“There are lots of examples of this stuff working and that’s what we should be doing,” he said.
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