More Citizen's Arrests, More Crimes, More Prisons

Just don't tick off the guy who runs the corner store.

In the National Post, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Brian Lee Crowley defends his organization’s publication of a report that countered the assertion favoured by StatsCan that crime is dropping. “[T]he choice is not between a ‘correct’ method, and all others,” he writes. “Every method, including StatsCan's, affects the resulting picture about crime,” and the Macdonald-Laurier method is simply another legitimate method, he argues. Whatever you think of the M-L study (which includes some dubious methodology like tracking crime volume rather than rates), Crowley strikes a much more equivocal tone in this column than the study itself, which was titled “Why Canadian crime statistics don’t add up” and strongly implies that StatsCan’s methods are incorrect.

The Vancouver Sun’s Ian Milgrew takes a healthy run at a Conservative-backed law that would make it easier for Canadians to make citizen’s arrests, calling it “a knee-jerk legislative response” motivated by the Tories’ “desire to be loved by the little guy … the small businessman on the front lines of the war against recalcitrant candy-bar thieves and dine-and-dash scofflaws.” The Mark Newsroom has to agree that the bill is purely political. We’re not sure what problem this law is supposed to address, and it’s irresponsible to empower shopkeepers not trained in apprehending criminals to take captive people who may or may not have actually committed a crime.

“It's hard to know who is more to blame,” writes the Montreal Gazette editorial board. “The Conservatives for twisting the facts about crime in Canada to convince Canadians they are living in dangerous times. Or Canadians for going along with the Conservatives' imagined higher crime rates.” Even if you think that the Tories’ tough-on-crime agenda is over the top, it’s hard not to read the Gazette’s argument as patronizing. Sure, a lot of stats show crime is going down, and the Conservatives’ attempts to use “unreported crime” as justification for building more prisons is laughable (unreported statistics can be used to prove anything, of course), but if a large portion of Canadians feel they are indeed living in unacceptably dangerous times, surely they’re entitled to that opinion.