DOES HARPER'S MESSAGE MATCH THE STATISTICS?

Recent Figures Seem to Contradict PM's Assertions About High Rates
and Trend Toward Serious Offences

OTTAWA -- As the Conservatives set out to focus on crime this week in
Parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a kickoff speech
on Thursday arguing that crime rates are high by historic standards
and there is now a trend to more serious crime.

But does the Prime Minister's message match the statistics?

Reported crime rates have generally fallen over the past 15 years. In
his speech, however, Mr. Harper remarked on how crime has risen since
he was a boy in the 1960s.

"Even if Canada's crime rates are low by international standards, they
are still very high by our own historical standards," Mr. Harper told
an awards dinner for the York Regional Police Force.

"When I was a boy growing up in Toronto, we knew nothing of street
gangs or crack houses. And gun crime was almost unheard of. That began
to change in the 1960s. And during the next three decades, the
violent-crime rate in this country more than tripled."

While it's true that reported crime rates are far higher than when Mr.
Harper, born in 1959, was a child, he didn't mention that they have
been declining relatively steadily since 1992.

There was a dramatic increase in the 1960s and 1970s in most of the
Western world, which may be partly ascribed to a younger population
because of the baby boomers, but it has never been adequately
explained, University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob said.

"They peaked in the early 1990s, and then drifted downward," he
said.

That's especially true of the overall crime rate, which fell almost 25
per cent from 10,342 crime incidents per 100,000 people in 1991 to
7,761 in 2005, the last year reported by the Canadian Centre for
Justice Statistics.

The rate of violent crime fell less dramatically, by 7.6 per cent,
since 1992.

University of Ottawa criminologist Ross Hastings said it's not clear
how reliable the statistics are because it's uncertain how Canadians'
behaviour in reporting crime has changed. But the question of whether
reported crime rates have gone up or down depends on one's starting
point.

"It's true if you're talking about 1960. But not in the past 10 years,
certainly," he said.

The "summer of the gun" that hit Toronto in 2005 attracted national
attention to crime and especially gun crimes, and all political
parties promised tougher action in the last election.

But the near doubling of gun homicides in the city in 2005 -- to 52
from 27 the previous year -- was followed by a drop to 29 in 2006,
roughly the same number as in each year from 2001 to 2004.

Prof. Doob argued that Mr. Harper has quoted crime statistics
selectively.

In his speech, Mr. Harper spoke of worrying "trends," saying that
"crime rates in some categories have begun to rise again in recent
years."

"For instance, the most recent report by the Canadian Centre for
Justice Statistics shows increases in homicide, attempted murder,
serious assaults and robbery. Gang-related homicides in Ontario
doubled in a single year, and 70 per cent of those murders involved
guns."

What he didn't mention was that the rates of many other violent crimes
went down in 2005, so the overall violent-crime rate did not change.

The trend in the crimes he did mention, such as homicide and attempted
murder, has largely been downward since the late 1970s.

Homicide rates in 2005, for example, were two-thirds the level
reported in 1977, and, since that year, they had generally drifted
downward until 2004. The rate increased in 2004 and 2005, bringing
them back to mid-1990s levels.

Attempted-murder rates rose by 14 per cent in 2005, but were still
20-per-cent lower than in 1995.

The other category mentioned by Mr. Harper, reports of gang-related
homicides in Ontario, has increased in this decade over the 1990s, but
the numbers move up and down dramatically from year to year. The
"doubling" that he cited for 2005 brought the number to 31 -- lower
than the 38 reported in 2003.

And the 2005 statistics for gang-related homicides that Mr. Harper
cited come with an asterisk attached, noting that it was the first
year the Centre for Justice Statistics asked police forces to include
homicides that are "suspected" of being gang-related.