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Fight crime at every level: Want to reduce the number of serious crimes?
Start by going after the apprentice-level ones

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With the flurry of shootings in Toronto, crime fighting has become a major issue in the closing days of the election campaign.

Prime Minister Paul Martin has proposed banning handguns while Conservative Leader Stephen Harper and NDP Leader Jack Layton want to see mandatory minimum sentences for violent crimes.

Unfortunately, these sound like examples of a political, rather than a practical, approach to a serious and long-standing problem. Homicides are tragic, particularly when the victims are young people -- but they are the tip of an iceberg, not an isolated phenomenon, and they can only be prevented, or at least minimized, by fighting crime as a whole.

The graphic below shows crime rates in the Greater Vancouver Region, metropolitan Toronto and New York City. The first figure in each category records the number of incidents per 100,000 population. The second, in brackets, shows the actual volume of crimes committed.

A word of caution: Authorities in Canada and the U.S. use different methods of collecting crime statistics, though not enough to alter the basic picture shown in the graphic. Several things are immediately clear.

First, the homicide figures, grim as they are, represent merely the visible tip of a massive body of criminal activity. In Vancouver car thefts are so numerous that over a 10-year period they equal a fifth of the region's entire vehicle fleet.

Break-ins are even more commonplace: In the same period they represent a third of all private dwellings in the region. Second, the sheer number of property crimes in our cities means the majority go unprosecuted. Most are not even investigated beyond a formal recording of the incident.

These are the conditions that embolden young crooks and teach some of them a fatal disregard for the law.

If we set aside spousal killings, virtually all the murders in Canadian cities are committed by young men with extensive prior histories of law-breaking. Looking at the graphic, it's not hard to see where they gained their apprenticeship.

Moreover, threats of longer prison sentences have minimal deterrent effect, for by the time these young men take gun or knife in hand, they have lost their fear of law-enforcement authorities.

Now let's look at New York's experience. Of course their homicide numbers are higher than ours -- every American city has that problem. But since 1990, crime rates in the Big Apple, including murders, are down a stunning 80 per cent.

And they didn't do it by limiting their attention to violent crime or banning handguns. They did it by cracking down across the board, starting with so called "petty" offences -- like house-breaking and car thefts. The city adopted a "zero-tolerance" policy toward any form of infraction, even non-payment of subway fares.

More police officers were hired and foot patrols were reinstated. One result, as the graphic shows, is there are three times fewer property crimes per capita in New York City than in the Greater Vancouver Region.

And New York's crime rate continues to plummet: Last year, there were actually fewer car thefts in that city of eight million people than in Vancouver with its two million residents. But more important, homicides are also down, dramatically, from 2,245 in 1990 to 535 -- the lowest level since the early 1960s.

If you want to attack the top of the crime pyramid, start at the bottom. Most Canadian cities, by comparison, have followed the opposite approach. While making ineffectual noises about violent crime, they have all but given up on property offences.

Vancouver has reduced the number of patrol officers over the last decade, and convictions are obtained in only about 10 per cent of robberies. The region suffers a higher rate of car thefts than 99 of the 100 largest cities in the U.S., and more break-ins than 97 of them.

That our strategy doesn't work is palpably obvious. A recent study by the U.K. Home Office showed that after England, Canada had the worst crime rate of 35 countries in Europe and North America.

We can only hope this election brings a renewed determination to fight crime the right way -- across the board.