DON'T LET THE POLICE FOOL YOU ABOUT CRIME STATS

Next time you hear the argument that Toronto needs a larger police force,
recall the data the police themselves publish about what they do. It's
surprising and sometimes hard to believe, but apparently true.

On average, a police officer in Toronto arrests nine people a year -- about
one person every six weeks. Most people assume that most officers are
involved in work of significant danger, struggling to subdue and arrest
criminals on a daily basis. It's not true.

The number of people the police arrested for criminal offences in 2000 was
47,771. There were 5,372 uniformed officers on the force. That's the math
that produces nine arrests per officer per year. For every cop who arrests
one person a week for the year, there are four who don't arrest anyone.

This (and other) data is found in the 2001 Environmental Scan released by
the Toronto Police in May. The report also notes that the number of people
being arrested is slowly falling -- it has fallen 10 per cent since 1996,
even though Toronto's population has increased by more than 100,000.

Crime is often measured by the number of charges laid, but that depends on
two things. First, incidents that could be crimes must be reported to the
police, and it is well established that many incidents never come to police
attention. Some women are unwilling to report sexual assault, some murders
aren't reported, some thefts are considered too minor to report.
Victimization studies show that there are many more victims than crimes.

Secondly, incidents become crimes only when police lay charges, and that's
another story. Some criminologists think police have decided to lay a lot
more charges against youth than in the past, hence the "rise" in violent
youth crime. Also, police usually lay more than one charge for any one
incident. Last year 195,000 charges were laid, an average of four charges
against every person arrested in Toronto. In the case of Ontario Coalition
Against Poverty members allegedly going into the Attorney General's
community office, for instance, it has been reported that 84 charges were
laid against 17 individuals. Every person arrested for a single drug
incident can expect to face about three charges. Charging someone with
multiple crimes for the same incident might help the police obtain a
conviction, but it makes it difficult to tell whether crime is on the rise
or not. Is violent crime in Toronto increasing, or are the police just
laying more charges for violent crimes against those arrested? We don't know.

We do know that almost everyone who gets arrested is strip-searched,
although that's not reported in this police document. As some
criminologists say, this kind of intimidation (none of those arrested have
yet been found guilty of anything) is police acting as though they are the
justice system, rather than a small part of it.

Less than 20 per cent of charges laid are categorized by the police as
"violent crimes." Of those, more than half are simple assaults where no
serious harm is done -- such as two guys fighting in a bar after drinking
too much, or shoving matches that result in a few bruises but no
requirement for hospitalization. If one excludes these shoving matches,
which are registered as assaults, the number of charges for violent crime
has fallen considerably since 1996, presumably because there isn't as much
violent crime in our city.

We're just like other places -- violent crime is on the decline, although
that's not fairly captured by the police data. (One other point:
three-quarters of all robberies and assaults, including assaults where more
serious physical harm was done, do not involve weapons of any kind.)

Put the figures about violent crimes together with arrests and the picture
looks like this: of those arrested, less than one person in four is accused
of a crime involving violence. So the average officer arrests two people a
year accused of a violent crime. It makes you wonder about the training
police get, and why they are armed to the teeth. Don't these figures say
police work is mostly about some ill-defined kind of community or social work?

Drug charges have almost doubled since 1996 -- 10,550 charges were laid
last year against 4,100 persons -- although more than half the charges are
for simple marijuana possession. One can see why the Toronto police are not
in favour of decriminalizing marijuana possession: without those charges,
there would be a visible enough drop in the numbers to weaken police calls
for more money.

Consider a few other interesting facts. For instance, three-quarters of
women who are sexually assaulted know the perpetrator (a figure that
generally holds in cases of homicide as well), although this report doesn't
say so. This points to strategies of strengthening women and countering the
sexist nature of society if we want to reduce the incident of sexual
assault. The police department, unfortunately, has never thought it wise to
take women's complaints too seriously. Attempts to reform police practices
around sexual assault have not been welcomed at police headquarters.

It's not difficult to make the case that Toronto is over-policed -- that
is, we could do with fewer police. There's one uniformed officer for every
507 residents in Toronto compared to Calgary (710), Peel Region (789), York
Region (858), Durham Region (883), Hamilton (710), Ottawa (773), London
(804), Edmonton (569) and Winnipeg (527). Only Montreal (448) and Vancouver
(487) have more police per capita. The cost of policing per capita is
higher here ($219 per year) than all other cities except Vancouver ($222).
Calgary and Edmonton are thought to have the best police forces in the
country: their costs are $168 and $190 per capita.

The data in this article is put out by the Corporate Planning Unit of the
Toronto Police, and unfortunately, it's not available on the police Web
site, www.torontopolice.on.ca. But it's a public document available from
the Toronto Police Services Board (808-8080), and it tells a different
story about policing than is often heard.