Numbers show decline in some crimes
Posted Jul 20, 2010 03:38:49 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Statistics Canada says police-reported crime fell last year in both numbers and severity. In the report released today (July 20th) the agency says it’s a continuation of a decade-long trend.
While the numbers appear to fly in the face of the federal Tory government’s worries about crime and the need for tougher laws and sentences, a Halifax area Criminologist disagrees.
The report says nearly 2.2 million crimes were reported to police in 2009, about 43,000 fewer than in 2008. Car thefts, break-ins and mischief cases accounted for most of the decline.
The latest numbers may show a lower incidence of property crime, but an increase in violent youth crime in Nova Scotia. Don Clairmont is Professor Emeritus of the Atlantic Institute of Criminology.
He says crimes of opportunity, like break and enters and shoplifting, are done by a small group of habitual criminals. And Clairmont suggests the people who are responsible are likely known to police. He says arresting them and putting them away – even for a few years – can have a direct impact on crime rates.
Clairmont characterizes violent crimes as the ones that have the biggest impact on a society. And he says the strategy for dealing with those kinds of incidents are different.
Nationally, the crime rate fell 3 per cent last year and was 17 per cent lower than a decade ago, while the crime severity index, which measures the seriousness of incidents reported, declined 4 per cent last year and was down 22 per cent from 1999.
