The October 22nd
municipal election in Thunder Bay should start heating up as we move into the
final four weeks of the campaign. There
are indeed quite a few campaign signs sprouting up and in a sign that the race
has intensified there is even some campaign
sign vandalism. On the one hand,
having a large number of candidates should make for an interesting race but on
the other hand with so many candidates, any real debate is going to be unwieldy
to manage and I expect the final outcomes will largely favour incumbents with name
recognition. This means that despite what seems to be an enormous appetite for change, there will be very little come the day after October 22nd. Still, one would be remiss
on not trying to highlight some of the issues.
In my August
8th post, I did a brief summary of what the main issue categories in
the coming election should be and today I want to focus on one specific issue
in particular – crime in Thunder Bay.
There is a lot of social media discussion as well as media reporting on
crime in Thunder Bay and also a lot of informal chatting among people and concerns
have been expressed about what seems to be substantial drug
driven gang activity. There are also
statistics that measure crime and Statistics Canada has
reported recently that Thunder Bay in 2017 leads Canadian cities in their
murder rate for a second year in a row.
The police response to
this news by the Acting Police Chief acknowledged the high homicide rate but the media
report also noted that “Despite having
the highest murder rate per capita for Canadian metropolitan areas and the
second highest in terms of severe crimes, the overall crime rate in the city of
Thunder Bay is down.” The response
of the Acting Chief accentuated the positive with the comment that “"Those numbers are great to see,"
Hauth said. "I think it’s continued
work internally and working with outside agencies. We’ve made great strides in
terms of doing things in the community."”
So what do the numbers
look like? Well, there are specific traditional
crime rates for assorted offenses and incidents with the overall crime rate in
terms of incidents per 100,000 of population actually down in 2017. There is also what is known as the crime
severity index which uses a weighting method to account for both the number of crimes
and their severity. There sometimes is
confusion in media reports between the crime rate and the crime severity index
and the confusion mounts if one goes up while another goes down. However, if one looks at longer term trends,
both sets of number tell a similar story.
Crime overall has come down in Thunder Bay over the last 15 years, but
certain types of crime have actually gone up.
In particular, violent crime and homicides in particular.
In the case of Thunder
Bay, the overall crime rate in 2017 declined from 6,771 incidents per 100,000 in
2016 to 6,576 incidents per 100,000 – a drop of 2.9 percent. Since 1998, the overall crime rate in Thunder
Bay has declined from 10,911 incidents per 100,000 to the current 6,576. However, the homicide rate has exhibited an
opposite trend going from 2.6 homicides per 100,000 in 1998 to 6.04 per 100,000
in 2017. When it comes to crime
severity, the accompany figure sums it all up quite nicely.
The overall crime
severity rate (with everything relative to a base of 100) was quite stable from
1998 to about 2010 and then fell and has stabilized since 2012. For 2017, the crime severity index is up from
87.48 to 88.25- an increase of about 1 percent.
The decline in the crime rate however is being driven by the fall in the
rates of non-violent crime. What is more alarming is the increase in
violent crime which in 2017 is the highest it has been since 1998.
We can argue that
crime rates are down overall, but the concern of the public is that violent
incidents – homicides, assaults, etc… seem to be on the way up. Drug possession or a vehicle theft is a
problem, but the public is more perturbed by gang and drug related violence and
homicides. The issue facing municipal candidates is what solutions can be
offered to deal with the rising rates of violent crime in Thunder Bay? And to help frame the discussion in a simple manner
amenable to most municipal candidates, should solutions involve more resources
to police or more effective use of existing resources and what should those
solutions be?