Crime rate down
But police spending doubled in past decade
Maybe people should have been locking their doors 20 years ago, and they should be leaving them unlocked today, because data published this week by Statistics Canada shows that Canadians are safer than they’ve been in generations.
And when it comes to overall crime, Newfoundland and Labrador as a whole has seen a decline over the past decade between 2004 and 2014 — both when it comes to violent crime and overall crime.
Moreover, when it comes to the Crime Severity Index, which measures both volume and seriousness of Crime, St. John’s ranks close to the national average.
And like Canada as a whole, the St. John’s Crime Severity Index has been dropping.
Jane Sprott, a professor in criminology at Ryerson University, said that this is actually part of an international trend that experts don’t fully understand.
“There’s a lot of different theories being kicked around, but at this stage, I think it will take a long time to try to figure out what is going on,” Sprott said. “How do you explain this? You sort of can’t, at this point, except that it’s a pretty remarkable decline that’s going on in these countries.”
Despite the fact that the crime rate in St. John’s has dropped by 14 per cent since 2004, police spending has actually increased massively.
In 2005, the provincial budget line item for the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary was $26.7 million, and in the 2015 budget it was $52.2 million.
Justice and Public Safety Minister Darin King said that he thinks the government needs to do a better job of communicating to people that crime is actually decreasing, and that people are safer.
However, King said that no matter how low the crime rate goes, he doesn’t think that’s a cause for reducing the size of the police force.
“You know, I think that would be an awesome goal to aspire towards, but I tend to be a realist, and I’m not sure we’ll ever get to that point,” he said.
Ab Singleton, deputy chief of the RNC for criminal operations, said you can’t point to one single thing that’s causing the decline of crime in the city, but he said that the police are getting smarter about how they conduct operations.
“We have an increased capacity in crime analysis,” Singleton said. “We’re taking a collection of data sets, putting it together through analysts and saying you know what, there’s a pattern of crime in this particular area of the city.”