How is HN falling for this again, barely 24h after the Bob Lee story showed how this forum is prone to these narratives?
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.
He was stabbed in San Francisco. Everyone and their mother complained about the crime and homeless problems there and blamed the "progressive policies" for his death. Musk too chimed in obviously...
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.
Not what I said. The fact that you would choose to make a straw-man argument instead of a proper debate speaks volumes.
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.
30 years of cuts to social safety nets, and life becoming affordable will do that. When as a country we prefer funding more policing, and less on affordable housing, healthcare, and education, we end up with a crisis like this. The fact that people act surprised is mind boggling. People have been warning about this for decades.
I fear that this is only the start of a worsening trend.
Honest question here: How does poverty imply violent crime? I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example. I don’t see how when someone is struggling with poverty that will increase their probability of engaging in violence.
> I don’t see how when someone is struggling with poverty that will increase their probability of engaging in violence.
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.
>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.
It’s more related to poverty adjacent to wealth. If everyone is poor, nobody feels poor. If poor people are next to rich people, you often get crime and eventually violence.
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.
Perhaps the price for committing crime is very high. Or poverty in a given place is not actually a life of misery.
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 been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example.
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.
I would not want to compare people's minds in "impoverished areas of China" to those in Canada. I think we have different composition and behavior patterns.
In that case, wouldn’t that imply that we should figure out how to change people’s “behavior patterns” as the root cause of violence instead of blaming poor people for violence just by virtue of them being poor?
>> When as a country we prefer funding more policing, and less on affordable housing, healthcare, and education, we end up with a crisis like this.
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.
This is demonstrably not true. Look at new york. They bring in broken window policing and do it passably well and things turn around in a decade. They then stop enforcing the law and move to a more laid back, defund the police style and things turn back towards trending to crap again. The other stuff you mentioned matters but the biggest thing is effective policing of all crime.
If violent crime had been worse before, but it was largely perpetrated by those who knew the victim, that's a very different risk profile to random attacks. If it was previously majority domestic violence, but now it's untreated mental illness and revolving door prisons, it also demands a different solution.
It's also not affordable to treat mental health here. A 50 min session costs $220 and benefits mostly don't cover it to this day. The hope is that the current clinical testing with ai based therapy bots can increase accessibility and affordability to therapists I would think. What other realistic option is there?
And maybe I just missed it, but they never said whether the amount of crime was actually worse. They spent a fair bit of time on a survey where most people said they thought crime was worse. But that has never not been true, even when crime was rapidly falling.
I believe the article goes on to make the point that while violent crime overall has been worse, the difference now is that many of the victims are not themselves violent criminals. In other words, whereas previously violence was largely confined to violent people, now, random innocent people are involved.
>> Technically worse? (Is that the best kind of worse?).
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.
The article talks about closure of mental hospitals and an increase in violence. But, unless I missed it they didn’t make a connection between the two. I don’t think any of the killings of the 8 police officers in the article were done by medically ill people. Yes the mentally ill can be violent, but I don’t think that’s behind the increase in violence here, and it’s disingenuous to report it this way, as if it is, with no evidence to back it up.
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.
Toronto's (and GTA) social services system is completely underfunded and neglected. There isn't nearly enough capacity for housing those in need, let alone support and recovery programs. Not really sure what the solution is but its broken as hell. None of this is helped by the fact that so much drug and sex trafficking goes through this city.
Bob Rae focused on a lot of important issues, his 1991 budget was extremely well thought out, focusing heavily on integrated neighborhoods, low income housing, and social security, he wanted to make sure that fast forward, Ontario didn't turn into a total nightmare. Well, here we are. I'll never forgive Mike Harris for what he did to the province.
Canada has made a concerted effort in recent years to accelerate immigration and increase their population. I believe their population recently went up by a million in 1 year for the first time ever for example. For a smallish country, that's a massive leap.
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.
Immigration is great if you have integration programs and systems in place deal with it. Canadian immigration has been rapid AND unstructured. Justin Trudeau is fond of saying we're the words first "postnational" country - we have "no national identity" - I'm a 6th generation Canadian and that idea boggles my mind.
> Is the excess violent crime committed by recent immigrants?
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'm not necessarily saying that recent immigrants are committing a disproportionate share of crimes
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.
1) I'm an American who is not super familiar with Canadian crime statistics.
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'm in similar shoes. I was just curious to understand the Canadian situation better.
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:
It's such an uncomfortable topic that this right wing news article doesn't even hint at that as a possibility. Canada's Most Wanted list seems to support your theory, though.
Note that National Post is a very conservative publication, and as such is going to have a bias for "tough on crime" solutions. It is not surprising that this article chooses to focus on bail reform.
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.
> happened almost exactly at the same time as the fact that rents jumped out of reach for many people.
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.
I primarily blame municipal governments for the housing crisis, with a secondary finger pointed at the provincial governments that have the constitutional power to override bad municipal decisions.
This is the fruit of NIMBYism, same as in California.
No mention of the federal government adding a million people last year? Even if the provincial governments eliminated all zoning rules, there just is not enough building capacity to keep up with that reckless immigration rate.
Agree. In Canada,we basically have media that is universally anti-Trudeau (National Post, Toronto Sun) and media that is universally pro Trudeau (CBC, CTV, Global news, Toronto Star).
Global is owned by Corus, the same company that owns all of right wing talk radio. It is not firmly right-wing like the a postmedia group, but also not firmly pro-Trudeau. And while the Star has historically had a stron left-wing bias, it is starting to drift to center under its new conservative ownership.
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.
The housing market is so tight that crack houses sell for $1M in major cities. Problem is, it's not like the junkies and squatters disappear after that. They move into public spaces like parks and metro stations which causes conflict and violence that the general public now sees. It seems like every day there's stories of a stabbing or whatever happening on a bus or train.
I’m not saying there isn’t an issue, but you’d never know from this article. Lots of weasel words & assumptions. (“How many stabbings do we not know about because they missed vital organs?”) This definitely isn’t journalism.
This is some disgusting, fearmongering, copaganda.
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.
Solution is to work on lowering the house prices and preach good family values which were the glue for many societies throughout history.
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 whole west is seeing a rise in violent crime rates.
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!"
I don't get this. The whole (western) world is sinking, including my country x but I cant notice or complain that my country x is sinking if I'm conservative and every other western country is sinking?
Could every sinking country have something in common... like being a Western country?
Religion has nothing to do with it. Some religious countries face the same issues (e.g., U.S.), while some do not (e.g., Saudi Arabia and UAE). It has more to do with the lack of social safety nets, inequality, rampant drug abuse, et al.
> how much the state seems to do to keep their poor citizens at bay.
The example your cite can be viewed in different lights I suppose. It could be “keeping poor citizens at bay” or it could be “recognizing a reality and providing a place to dispose of needles so that workers disposing of the garbage don’t accidentally get pricked”.
Also, needles don’t necessarily mean illicit drugs. Could be diabetic needles too.
Canada is pretty progressive at decriminalizing drugs (marijuana a few years back and now hard drugs in BC to a certain amount) in an effort to avoid throwing people in jail. In conjunction with the roll out of safe/supervised injection sites, I would interpret this as trying less to keep these citizens at bay (in jail) and more at trying to give people freedom and autonomy over their bodies.
That said, if you really want to make the case that the government is keeping poor people poor, you needn’t look beyond our interest rate and housing supply policies over the last two decades, and our complete inability to restrict corporate oligopolies from further consolidating. I.e. if you want to complain about us you aren’t doing a very thoughtful job :-)
It's remarkably difficult to find good data comparing the "generous safety net" approach to the "tough love" approach in terms of effects on homelessness, poverty, and crime.
To continue receiving benefits, you must undergo continuous, invasive evaluation. If you receive a housing benefit, you are subject to home inspections, etc.
I suspect the containers in the bathrooms comes from the restaurants themselves. My brother is a manager of a Tim Hortons in a small city and he's had 3 overdoses in their bathroom in the last year. It's a sad artifact of the opioid epidemic which has grown a lot in the last several years.
I mean, there is some true to that. I left a Macbook Pro in public in Saudi Arabia. I came back looking for it (5 hours had passed since) and it was still there.
I think it’s more likely due to the fact that there are less social safety nets. When people can’t afford to live crime will increase. We’re working more and earning less. Productivity is increasing but the labor is experiencing any of the benefits.
When people can work a full time job and still not afford to support themselves you can’t act surprised when crime increases.
> Chief among this escalation was the killing of eight on-duty Canadian police officers in just the last six months. For context, between 1961 and 2009, a grand total of 133 Canadian police officers were murdered in the line of duty – an average of one every four and a half months.
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 can't speak for Canada, but for the US I think it's important to acknowledge that leading up to (and beyond) the "years of ACAB and calls to defund the police" we had/have rampant police corruption and lack of accountability.
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.
We're incapable of discussing this topic, it's ridiculous. Even this article, flawed and biased as it may be, could have spawned heated but productive discussion. And every sane comment here that doesn't tow the inclusive and left-wing narrative has been down voted. Likewise the whole thread is now flagged.
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.
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.