Spending more money on the police shows no clear correlation with lower crime levels

One effect we are now seeing from inflation, which is largely a product of the pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is increases in municipal taxes on a scale that was politically unthinkable not so long ago.

Brandon, Manitoba's second largest city, is making a proposal an increase of 10 percent. Calgary increased taxes by 7.8 percent. Vancouver City Council approved a 7.5 percent increaseand Toronto City Council is debating a proposed 10.6 per cent increase.

However, one item that generally doesn't get much attention in all of this is the cost of policing, the largest expense in most Canadian municipalities.

While this varies by province, in many communities police budgets are discussed by police boards, which then pass their recommendations to municipal councils for final approval. In Toronto, the Council is considering a proposal to increase police spending by CAD 18.3 million to CAD 1.35 billion.

But on social media and at City Hall, police are urging the Council to adopt the Police Board's recommendation and add another $12.6 million to the increase. Chief Myron Demkiw said not doing so would “create unacceptable risks and jeopardize the department's ability to ensure public safety, provide community policing and proactively patrol the city.”

Chief Demkiw is not the first police official to paint a bleak picture of the consequences of rejecting the police's request for more money. And it has come at about the same time as researchers published a paper looking at the relationship over a decade between increased police spending and crime in Canada's twenty largest cities.

The result? “We didn't see a consistent correlation between crime rates and police funding,” Mélanie Seabrook, a researcher at the MAP Center for Urban Health Solutions and lead author of the paper, told me.

While the vast majority of those cities increased their spending on police services, only Edmonton and Saskatoon, after adjusting for inflation, experienced a statistically significant decline in crime between 2010 and 2020, the study period. Conversely, Ontario's Peel Region, which also includes Mississauga and Brampton; Quebec City; Gatineau, Quebec; and Winnipeg experienced a significant increase in crime after police spending was increased. For the other municipalities it was actually a wash.

Ms. Seabrook, whose laboratory is part of St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, said the researchers had not used raw crime statistics to avoid biasing the study. More police spending can lead to more police officers who in turn make more arrests, increasing the number of reported crimes.

Instead, they tied police spending to one crime severity index published by Statistics Canada, which adjusts the volume of crimes based on how serious they are and factors in the population. The theory, she says, is that major crimes will always be reported, no matter how many police officers patrol a given spot.

Figuring out how much cities actually spend on policing, rather than what they budget, has proven to be a bigger struggle because many cities don't make the spending readily available, Ms. Seabrook said.

“A big challenge,” she said when she found out how much policing costs. “That's part of the reason why there isn't a lot of this kind of research into police budgets happening in Canada.”

Although the general findings of the article that will appear in Canadian public policy, is consistent with similar studies in the United States, Ms. Seabrook said she and the other researchers were surprised by the wide disparities in police spending across Canada. At the high end, Vancouver spends about C$500 per capita annually, while Quebec City police get about C$200 per capita.

“It obviously raises questions about why there is such a big difference in spending and what is taken into account when setting those budgets,” she said, adding that the budget increases came within the context of a long-standing general decrease in crime across Europe. Canada.

Ms. Seabrook and the other investigators aren't done yet. Their next project is to compare the data they collected on police spending with what cities spent on social services during the same period.

“We hope this will shed some light on what types of services are prioritized by councils,” she said.

Trans-Canada

• Several Republican politicians in the United States are suggesting that it is time to build a wall along the border with Canada. But when my colleague Jazmine Ulloa traveled to Pittsburg, NH, a border town, she found no support for the idea.

• A Federal Court judge has ruled that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act to end a truck convoy protest that rocked Ottawa and several border points was an unjustified violation of civil rights and that the government did not meet the conditions required by law to invoke the state of emergency. It. The decision contradicts the conclusion of a public inquiry and the government plans to appeal.

• Norman Jewison, the Toronto-born filmmaker whose films ranged from the socially conscious drama “In the Heat of the Night” to the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” and the romantic comedy “Moonstruck,” has died at the age of 97.

• British Columbia is expected to be hit by excessive rain and heavy snow from two atmospheric rivers.

• Jesse Green, The Times' chief theater critic, cites “Casey and Diana” by Nick Green, a Toronto playwright, as an example of how to portray Diana, Princess of Wales, without her being “dragged into trauma porn, torn apart.” with the excuse of reincarnating her.”

• A Quebec man who spread online conspiracy theories suggesting the Canadian government deliberately set wildfires to convince people that climate change is happening has now pleaded guilty to setting more than a dozen fires.

• Nearly a decade after nine blue whales died after being trapped in ice near Newfoundland, a DNA analysis of their remains and other blue whales has found a ticking time bomb in blue whale demographics, strange migration patterns and clandestine matings between species.

• A rare form of salmonella that sickened dozens of people, including several babies, in Canada and the United States has been linked to pet bearded dragons.

Ian Austen, born in Windsor, Ontario, educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has been writing about Canada for The New York Times for 20 years.

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