No clear factor behind declining crime rate in York Region, Canada

Yorkregion.com
July 30, 2015
By Jeremy Grimaldi

There are plenty of theories as to why Canada and York Region’s police-reported crime rate has been dropping so regularly and rapidly over the past two decades, but few concrete answers.

The government points to their laws, police to their tactics.

But, according to criminologists, the reason is far more complex.

They point to the fact that crime isn’t just falling in Markham or Newmarket, across the GTA or across Canada, but in most of the Western world.

“The simple answer is, I don’t know why it’s happening,” said Anthony Doob, professor of criminology at the University of Toronto. “Whatever it is, it’s not singular and it’s not about the criminal justice system.”

Theories abound about what has changed since 1969, the last time serious crime in Canada was this low.

Perhaps what’s most noteworthy is just how quickly the numbers are falling, according to Statistics Canada’s latest crime report, released last week.

Last year, the FBI reported the violent crime rate in the United States fell almost 5 per cent between 2012 and 2013 to its lowest point since 1978.

In Canada, the number of violent incidents, 369,500, also dropped by 5 per cent between 2013 and 2014.

That’s the lowest it’s been since 1969 and marks 11 straight years of decline.

In York, one of the safest communities of its size in the country, the change was even more dramatic, with the number of crimes being reported to the police in 2014 at just 29,034, a drop of 11 per cent since 2010.

When population ratios are taken into account, the decrease is even more dramatic.

There were 2,589 criminal incidents per 100,000 people in 2014, down 17 per cent from 2010.

According to the statistics, police, including the RCMP and York Regional Police, are charging fewer people here too.

The number of adults entering the criminal justice system has fallen by 20 per cent since 2010 and the number of youths charged in York Region plummeted by a staggering 46 per cent to 618 in 2014 from 1,161 over that same period.

The decline is not only “remarkable”, the reason for it remains a bone of contention among those who study crime trends, according to Rosemary Gartner, a criminology professor at U of T.

“We criminologists have been trying to explain it for some years - since the decline began more than 20 years ago - but there is still no consensus,” she said. “We’ve been banging our heads against the wall.”

Among the competing theories are:

• The low crime rate can be linked to women’s access to abortion in the 1970s, meaning there are now fewer unwanted children in the world.
• Baby boomers have grown old and rarely commit crimes any longer, meaning there are fewer young people per million, hence fewer in the “crime-prone” age.
• More females have access to abuse shelters, meaning women and children are able to escape abusive relationships.
• Our drinking water is increasingly free of lead, meaning there are fewer incidents of lead poisoning - a factor some consider highly prevalent in cases of mental health issues years ago.
  

Other theories argue the decline is so dramatic and widespread it can only be cultural.

One study out of England claims there may be links between young people playing video games and engaging in social media often at home, rather than causing trouble with friends outdoors.

The study begins by explaining how during The Beatles’ first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. There were no reported crimes in the United States between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., while some 73 million people tuned into the program.

It continues to draw anecdotal links between video game playing, social networking and a drop in crime.

Although there isn’t enough evidence to support this theory, other trends being witnessed among young people might lend it more weight.

That includes the theory that risk-taking behaviour among youth is going down, including drinking and driving, smoking and crime, according to Gartner.

“Maybe it’s a change in people’s sensitivity to risk,” she pondered.

It turns out physical violence is more uncommon among young people, according to Anne Marie Singh, a professor from Ryerson’s department of criminology.

Singh said police may also be “diverting” young people out of the criminal justice system and into areas such as mental health care and mediation.

“There may be a cultural aspect to what types of behaviour should be tolerated and how we should respond,” she said. “With youth, there’s more of a sense of youth experimentation - that we need to be more tolerant of young people’s behaviour, we need to focus on rehabilitation. If rehabilitation for adults is gone, there’s still this idea we can’t give up on the kids.”
But the fall in crime isn’t just happening among young people, it’s occurring in all age groups.

Doob says the problem might be that criminologists are looking at what’s happening now rather than at what happened decades ago.

“In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, there was a blip up, so we may just be returning to the trend from before,” he said, noting that before “the blip” crime was at a similar rate in many categories as it is now.

He further noted that in 1976, the murder rate in Canada was twice as high as it is now and that Canada currently has its lowest murder rate since 1962, 1.5 per 100,000.

“To be honest,” he noted, “we’re better at saying what isn’t causing this than we are about what is.”