BRINGING ORDER TO THE CORE

More Police Patrols Downtown Would Curb Criminal Behaviour

Mayor Dave Bronconnier's call for more police in the downtown area
should be supported, but it is not the number of homicides in Calgary
that makes his case. Rather, it is the need to establish a sufficient
atmosphere of order that ordinary citizens, especially those who by
their poverty and homelessness are among the city's most vulnerable,
can feel safe on the streets.

The best way to establish order is by interrupting criminal activity
again, and again and again. More police will lead to more arrests.
That will have an impact on behaviour.

The problem with simply looking at the number of homicides is that
too many of them are domestic, or didn't take place downtown where
the extra police Bronconnier recommends would be deployed.

Of Calgary's 22 murders this year, at least eight involved people in
some kind of relationship, usually a conjugal one but also in one
case a mother who strangled her daughter during a fight. Another
involved an 81-year-old man charged with killing his 77-year-old
(male) roommate at a care home.

Two fit the classic description of a beast in the bushes, attacking
vulnerable women. Ten seem to have some connection with the drugs or
organized criminal activity, but of these, five were in the suburbs.

Some homicides cannot be prevented, only solved. No amount of police
downtown, or anywhere else, can prevent domestic disputes, or the
carefully planned hit on one drug dealer by another in a quiet part
of town. Two thirds of the city's murders this year would have
happened anyway, even if twice as many constables patrolled the
six-block radius identified by the mayor as the city's Ground Zero of mayhem.

Indeed, the murder rate itself is mere chance. A man can die from a
single blow, or recover from massive injuries. Sometimes the
difference between life and death is that a rib deflects a blade, or
a bullet misses vital organs by a few centimetres -- all quite beyond
an assailant's control.

Take, for instance, the July rampage that took the life of Jacqueline
Crazybull. In what is thought to have been a bizarre gang initiation,
five people minding their own business were stabbed in separate
incidents, by a group of young black men, between the Beltline and Forest Lawn.

Only Crazybull died, but, nothing stood between 26 deaths to date,
other than fluke and excellent emergency care.

A statistic that matters more than the number of deaths, is the
number of incidents that could easily have led to deaths. Although
firearms incidents are down, other kinds of attack are growing.
Swarmings, once unheard of in Calgary, now happen regularly. Knife
attacks, also once quite rare, grew last year to a reported 815, from
728 the year before. (How many go unreported is not known.)

It is here the mayor will find persuasive evidence to support his
demands for more police boots on the street, because it is mostly the
drug scene that breeds these incidents, and drug dealing on the
street that vigilant policing can deter.

So, give police what they need to hit the drug trade at the consumer
level. Arrest small-time dealers as well as wholesalers. Harass these
people, hit them with heavier fines, make their business uneconomic.

No, it will never be completely eradicated.

It is not too late, however, to reduce it enough that the core
doesn't become a no-go area after dark. And, it is possible in doing
so to reduce the number of occasions when somebody could get killed.
Let's do it.