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Join host Tony Clement this week on "And Another Thing" as he delves into the pressing issue of Canada's crime surge. Flying solo, Tony sits down with renowned criminologist Michael Kempa to dissect the alarming rise in crime rates across the country. Together, they unpack the messages being conveyed by authorities to the Canadian public amidst these concerning developments. From analyzing root causes to exploring potential solutions, this episode offers invaluable insights into a critical issue affecting communities nationwide. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation that sheds light on the complexities of crime in Canada.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
and another thing and another thing and another thing and another thing
Introduction and Sponsor Acknowledgement
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of And Another Thing podcast. I'm your co-host Tony Clement. Jodie Jenkins is busy with his golf extravaganza coming up or something, but he sends his best regards and he'll of course be back in a future podcast. But we know that the show must go on here at And Another Thing podcast. And right off the top, we do want to thank our lovely sponsors because
00:00:44
Speaker
Well, those Bentleys do not drive themselves, as Jodi would say if he were here. Of course, right off the top, we want to thank Municipal Solutions, our presenting sponsor. John Mutton and the gang are very busy with being Ontario's leading MZO firm. They're there for development services and project management, development approvals, permit expediting, all sorts of planning services with municipalities.
00:01:09
Speaker
including engineering services and architectural services, even things like minor variances and land severances, they are there for you. You simply have to go to municipalsolutions.ca for all of your municipal solutions needs.
00:01:25
Speaker
And then our newest sponsor KWM Consulting. We want to thank Kelly Mitchell and the gang for being our newest sponsor. KWM has been in the lobbying and advocacy business for over 23 years and they support all sorts of companies, big businesses, small businesses on how they have to deal with governments on issues that affect them, their businesses.
00:01:48
Speaker
This company believes in honest ethical advice and the value of hard work. So contact Kelly Mitchell at kwconsulting.com or you can simply phone Kelly personally. He's ready to take your calls at 416-728-8287.
00:02:11
Speaker
I better double check that. It might be 8282. Oh, my handwriting is so terrible. Anyway, you can get them at kwconsulting.com for sure. And of course, our other sponsor is our terrestrial radio sponsor. Of course, yes. What I'm talking about is Hunters Bay Radio, huntersbayradio.com. And yeah, it is 8287. I knew. I just wanted to make sure that I had Kelly's number right there.
00:02:40
Speaker
And yes, our terrestrial sponsor, Hunter's Bay Radio, they do a great job in Muskoka. And every Saturday morning, they have a special selection of podcasts, including yours truly here for their listening audience. You can either tune into 88.7 FM
00:03:01
Speaker
if it's in your listening area or you can go to hundreds Bay radio dot com. They will look after you. Very special guest
Interview with Michael Kempa on Rising Crime
00:03:10
Speaker
today. Let's get right to it. His name is Michael Kempa. He is an associate professor at the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. He is also a commentator and journalist. He's written for The Hub, National Post, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, et cetera, et cetera. Michael, welcome to the program. OK, thank you.
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah. The reason you're on the program, of course, is because I did read your latest offering at The Hub, which is a great sort of news blog and opinion blog that one can subscribe to.
00:03:47
Speaker
And this was about the topic of crime generally, but a lot of it was specific to auto thefts, which has been out of control in our major cities in Ontario, throughout Canada. I guess the first thing I want to do is set the table for you here, and you tell us about some of the statistics that you know of about the surge of crime in our country right now.
00:04:17
Speaker
Well, if we look at overall crime rates, of course, everybody knows we had a famous decline in crime rates from the 1990s through to about the 2010s. Things got strange with crime rates over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic with people being at home. It just changed the opportunity structure for many crimes where property crimes went down for a period.
00:04:44
Speaker
It's much more difficult to break into people's homes and so forth when they're there. And things like domestic violence and hate crimes began to creep up over the course of the pandemic. But since society has started to open up again, and since the pandemic has distorted markets in a number of ways to create lucrative opportunities for organized crime in areas like auto theft and organized shoplifting and human trafficking,
00:05:13
Speaker
Some of those crimes which very often spill into violence have been exploding in the particular case of auto theft.
00:05:20
Speaker
across Canada, we're looking at about 150% increase over the course of the pandemic to now. And in places like Toronto, which has basically set up almost like a candy store serving a pipeline of car theft that goes through by rail to the ports of Montreal and then to international illicit markets, we're up around 300% over the last three years. So what that boils down to incredibly
00:05:49
Speaker
is that a vehicle is stolen every 40 minutes in the city of Toronto. And everybody has a story. I can assure you of that.
00:06:00
Speaker
They do, they've either had a vehicle stolen or had their replacement vehicle stolen or they have a neighbor who it's happened to or a family member. It literally has touched everybody's lives in the city of Toronto at minimum and at least at one level or two levels of connection across the rest of the province of Ontario.
00:06:23
Speaker
Your article in The Hub, which again was my reference point to contact you, you had three different explanations, I guess it's particular to auto thefts, but it could be more generalized as well, about why it's become so easy to commit crimes in our society. Do you want to go over that? Sure.
00:06:49
Speaker
The main thing being that, first of all, the police have been completely overwhelmed and unprepared partially through their fault and partially through the fault of their oversight bodies that are responsible for developing their planning with them, police services boards in Ontario, for example.
00:07:11
Speaker
and at the level of the RCMP that falls on the shoulders of the public safety minister, to prepare for the new world of what you could call high policing threats. So low policing is ordinary crime control. High policing is everything to do with the maintenance of the stability of the state and polity and economy. So mass protest, organized crime,
00:07:35
Speaker
foreign interference and Canada's political process. All of these things have come on in a very strong way over the course of the last five to six years. And this has severely taxed the resources of the police. They're running everywhere without a very clear mandate other than they're expected to basically do everything which has left them
00:07:58
Speaker
incapable of responding to the surge of low policing crime issues such as auto theft. So that's explanation number one.
00:08:08
Speaker
The other one that really struck me was this jurisdictional morass that we're in that different levels of government or different police services aren't really talking to one another and organized crime takes advantage of that, especially with auto thefts where you've got to deal with ports and you've got to deal with local police or provincial police. That's part of the problem too, is it not?
00:08:31
Speaker
It is, and this is becoming a familiar story now to Canadians in that they saw the same thing with the poorly coordinated response to the Freedom Convoy movement in 2020, where a situation that began as a perfectly legal protest ultimately spiraled out of control in a few locations, at least, because of the inadequate coordination between municipal police services, provincial policing services, the RCMP at the federal level,
00:09:00
Speaker
and our intelligence agencies. So a bit like that also with auto theft, if you sort of imagine the trip of a stolen vehicle when it's lifted from somebody's driveway or in front of their house, typically if people have any form of tracing technology, very often they pay for a private company to monitor those devices. So that private company, if they pick up a signal at all, will send somebody to try to trace the car.
00:09:28
Speaker
Typically, when a car is stolen, it will be parked in a public place for a day or two and observed at a distance by thieves just to make sure that nobody is tracing it. But if that private agency even finds it,
00:09:41
Speaker
And they mobilize the police. They call the police and say, we've got a vehicle. We've located it. If there are no suspects on the scene, that gets shuffled down to a low priority call, which sounds frustrating. But we have to remember police are also responding to calls for ongoing assaults, issues of weapons, domestic violence, where people are being harmed in an immediate sense. Those are higher priority calls. So once that car moves along, it gets on the rail lines, which are policed
00:10:11
Speaker
by an independent rail policing agency. It gets to the ports, say, for example, Montreal. That's the jurisdiction of the Canada Border Services Agency.
00:10:24
Speaker
And when they are policing the ports, imagine a place like Montreal, a major international shipping port where there's somewhere upwards of 12,000 containers moving out on a daily basis. They would very likely have single-digit staff of CBSA on board to
00:10:43
Speaker
essentially keep track of all of those shipping cards. If the police wire ahead and say we've got a vehicle we're concerned about, the CBSA with five or six people is racing against the shipping clock to locate it. If the police would like to help, they've got to get a judicial warrant. That takes days. The whole thing is basically a series of silos, very much like what we saw in the Freedom Convoy and a bit of a familiar story for how policing across jurisdictions tends to break down.
00:11:13
Speaker
Now, before I go on with that, I should say to give credit where it's due, there was just a coordinated operation between OPP, the Toronto Police Service and the Surtees in Quebec, where they did make a major series of arrests around auto theft. They had a sort of special joint task force to deal with the issue. And that's really the direction they need to be moving in that kind of joint action
00:11:38
Speaker
that you've got one task force across multiple police organizations that deal with certain categories of crime, those things that are hot and troublesome at a moment like auto theft. We have a major incident coordinator units as well for dealing with things like murders and so forth. So this is really part of the way forward.
Vigilante Justice and Community Impact
00:11:59
Speaker
So that is in contrast to the messaging of the Toronto police that was captured, I guess, on video or something, where at some community meeting, an officer said, well, you know, we can't really deal with this anymore, so just keep your car keys close to the door or even outside the door so that you're not the victim of a home invasion. What do you think about that?
00:12:27
Speaker
So I think, first of all, I understand why people responded the way they did to this constable, I believe his name is Ricciardi, his statement at Etobicoke Community Safety Meeting in that it sounds on its face sort of ridiculous. The idea, okay, well, you know, there's nothing we can do for you. So put your keys by the door and, you know, kind of hope for the best. Just hope that they don't come any deeper into your house armed with weapons.
00:12:55
Speaker
to harm you in looking for your keys. And of course, there were then all kinds of social media memes of people a bit like Santa Claus laying out their keys with cookies and so forth for thieves. I mean, I understand that reaction very much. Now, I think the officer in question, he probably had been speaking for about 90 minutes. He had probably said a number of things that should be done to secure vehicles. You know, if you've got club devices for locking your steering wheel,
00:13:25
Speaker
if you can put them in a garage, do so. Maybe take those boxes of old t-shirts and put them somewhere else and put your $70,000 Lexus away and so forth. And I think at the end, he did say, but look, there are armed people here. This is not a group of sort of random thieves. There are people who are recruited by organized crime.
00:13:48
Speaker
sometimes because they're paid well, sometimes because they're forced or coerced by organized crime. This very often happens with young offenders and they're armed and dangerous. So if everything else has broken down, if they're not deterred by the club, if they're not deterred by, if you're not able to keep it in a garage and so forth, maybe at minimum, keep your keys by the door. So if thieves come and they break into your home, they don't come deeper.
00:14:16
Speaker
than the front door. I think that was one thing he probably said amongst many other things, but still, it's a message that is sent to the public that we say, know the listening you're speaking into. The public is very fearful of this form of crime. And if you say that, you're essentially telling people
00:14:34
Speaker
are queued for listening to a negative message that you're on your own. There's nothing the state can do for you. Leave your keys by the door. The thieves have won. And that's a dangerous message because it says to people, essentially, the state is not really capable of securing you. Secure yourself. Yeah, Michael, you've been talking about sort of
00:14:57
Speaker
the wrong messages may be unwittingly being sent by Toronto Police Services or whomever. And it does lead down a dark alley when if the message received, even if it wasn't intended that way, but if the message received is you're on your own,
00:15:16
Speaker
then you're into this world of individual justice or vigilante justice or the increased cost to society to self-protect all of these things that are kind of indicative of a breakdown of society. Is that right? That's exactly it. An academic colleague of mine in Australia, a senior colleague called Pat O'Malley,
00:15:40
Speaker
Really put it nicely, he talks about the inadvertent statements of police along these lines. It's pulling the strings that unravel the social contract. So it's not on purpose, but essentially if you say to people, you're on your own.
00:15:55
Speaker
or there's only so much the police can do for you, or we need you to be responsible contributors to your own safety and so forth, and don't look to us for everything. It sends a message that the state is not capable of securing you, the citizen, from various forms of essentially predation, whether we're talking about
00:16:19
Speaker
local violent crime, random crime, or more complicated organized crime, which is coordinating these networks of things like auto theft, but also coordinated shoplifting that has become much more violent in commercial retail spaces, where typically young people very often work, shift work, and so forth. So it sends that message and it, in a sense, pushes people or helps to create that sensibility of fear
00:16:49
Speaker
and extremism where people, an extreme security perspective, I mean, where people will sort of batten down the hatches and basically say, alright, if there is no social contract and we're living in a feudal world, I will give you a feudal response. I will organize my own security. I will take matters into my own hands. It can go so far as people starting to engage in vigilante justice.
00:17:13
Speaker
where they're willing to use violence to secure their own property and families and so forth. So if you look at where this has gone further, first in the United States with communities starting to take on things like independent patrol, even if it's peaceful, it does create a culture where people become very suspicious of outsiders, almost a sort of neo-feudal type of culture,
00:17:40
Speaker
which has had tragic consequences, such as innocent people being shot in very rare instances by members of community patrol, the highest profile case, of course, being that of Zimmerman that shot to death a 16-year-old African-American youth, Trayvon Martin, in a Florida community several years ago.
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. You study this from a broad perspective, I'm sure, but it is not only indicative of a breakdown of society, but it also further
00:18:19
Speaker
I would argue further the idea that society is not working, that this is a canary in the coal mine, this is an indicator that generally society is not working. So it has really serious knockdown effects when you can't control this kind of crime. It certainly does. And one of my worries is
Policing Strategies and Community Involvement
00:18:48
Speaker
Whenever there's a breakdown in public order or in some category of crime, we've tended in criminal justice policy and policing approaches, community safety approaches to swing from one extreme to another.
00:19:02
Speaker
where we either go full law enforcement and say the solution is simply with all manner of aggressive law enforcement policing practices to the exclusion of all forms of community crime prevention and outreach and so forth. And then once in a while, when we do that for a bit and crime rates may spike up in certain areas, people say, well, you see, that doesn't work. So let's abandon policing entirely.
00:19:30
Speaker
Let's have no enforcement and move completely in the direction of community crime prevention, community safety and wellbeing and so forth. And these two extremes tend not to work very well. My view would always be that there's an important role for enforcement in broader strategies for community safety and wellbeing. There's very rarely a simple law enforcement solution to a complex problem.
00:19:58
Speaker
whether we're talking about auto theft or something a little bit more multi-layered like the fentanyl crisis in Canada, which relates to mental health issues, the unhoused problem or homelessness problem, organized crime again, and so forth. But enforcement is still a very important part of approaching what we call these wicked problems that have all of these layers. One important layer requires strict enforcement of certain rules.
00:20:28
Speaker
Can I just take us back to broken windows? After the crime waves of the 1970s and 1980s, Rudy Giuliani in New York and his police chief famously introduced this concept that every infraction had to be enforced against.
00:20:51
Speaker
in order to show society that there was order. And in fact, I guess you can argue causation, but the crime rates were reduced by this broken windows policy that if you see a broken window, you arrest the person who threw the rock through the window or, you know, this people jumping turnstiles,
00:21:14
Speaker
in the subway, you would detain them as well. You wouldn't just let these things go. That's the essence of broken windows, as I understand it. And then there was the bad rap on broken windows, which was, well, you're just targeting certain racial groups and therefore you can't do that anymore. So first of all, I'd love to get your comment on that. And secondly, are we turning back to a broken windows approach to this? Is that part of the solution, do you think?
00:21:45
Speaker
So it's very difficult to have any kind of rational conversation with people about broken windows or zero tolerance approaches to policing on the basis that most people simply have a very emotional position on the issue where they'll either say, I am strongly in favor of strict law enforcement to deal with horrible crimes. Or people will say, well, I am strongly against that. I prefer
00:22:14
Speaker
gentler approaches that work through prevention and mobilizing multiple crime prevention agencies and public health and education agencies and so forth. And that's all well and good, but if you have a very careful evidence-based discussion about what works in enforcement as it relates to all of these other programs, New York certainly did implement a very strict zero-tolerance policing program
00:22:43
Speaker
through the 1990s and they did observe a significant decrease in not only minor crimes but also especially major crimes, crimes of violence and murder in particular, fell quite a lot in New York.
00:22:59
Speaker
The issue is across the United States, including in places where they did not implement zero-tolerance policing programs, they had similar or in some cases even larger decreases in the same categories of crime. Now people will say, well, that will show you that zero-tolerance policing, if anything, just slowed down the progress that New York would have had. Now I'm not so sure about that. It depends on the nature of the problem. New York's problems were quite different
00:23:29
Speaker
The murder rates and the assault rates were astronomically higher per 100,000 population than they were in places like middle America and the Midwest and so forth. So different set of issues. The other issue that's hard to bring up for many people is serious crime.
00:23:47
Speaker
very often victimizes the poorest and racialized segments of our communities. If you go into areas that have high proportions of poor Canadians, if you go into public housing residences across the country,
00:24:05
Speaker
And you find that there are concentrations of different racialized groups there. Very often, members of those communities will tell you, we need help. We are often the victims of property crime, assaults, intimidation, and using our common spaces. They would like the police to use zero tolerance, not in every case, but in many situations, zero tolerance policing. But here's the key.
00:24:33
Speaker
They would like it to be done under the careful accountability and observation of the civilian oversight bodies to make sure that it's not being targeted only in areas of town where either poor or racialized groups of people reside. So it's very complex. You have to ask people in communities what they want and basically design policing programs that involve enforcement
00:25:03
Speaker
that are a part of the broader community safety and wellbeing programming that provinces have now mandated as mandatory to develop planning in every municipality.
Police Resources and Training
00:25:14
Speaker
Say, all right, well, if the police are going to do enforcement, how should it be done? And is it being properly monitored to make sure that certain segments of society are not being unfairly targeted?
00:25:27
Speaker
What else has to be done, Michael? We've touched on that topic. What else do you see as part of the solution for this crime situation? I think the biggest thing is the age old question of what is the mandate of the police organization?
00:25:42
Speaker
because they simply can't do everything. Toronto Police Service, Ottawa Police Service, any municipality simply cannot police all of the low policing ordinary crime control issues while also being expected to have a completely different skill set to engage the high policing issues of international organized crime, foreign interference, terrorism,
00:26:07
Speaker
ideological extremism and violence in our society, in other words, hate crimes and crimes of violence on the basis of various political ideologies and so forth.
00:26:17
Speaker
They can't do it all. So we have to have a serious conversation about whether there should be perhaps separate policing agencies or at least streams of police organizations where officers get very different training for doing that kind of work. And both sides of the house in that sense are properly resourced. And is that happening anywhere in Canada right now?
Community Safety Initiatives
00:26:43
Speaker
We've seen very limited
00:26:47
Speaker
positive discussions along those lines. Some of your more progressive or switched on police chiefs across Canada have been getting out in front of it a little bit in the sense that they've said, well, look, the writing is on the wall. The provinces have mandated that cities must come up with what they call CSWB plans, community safety and wellbeing plans.
00:27:12
Speaker
for coordinating all of these agencies that we all know about, public health, education, housing, and so forth, into essentially networks for dealing with low-level crime and disorder, then they're saying, so what is our role going to be as one of the key pillars involved in CSWB? So I have in mind places like Peel has got some good planning for getting out in front of integrating
00:27:39
Speaker
or having policing be a key supporting pillar.
00:27:43
Speaker
Out in Edmonton, there's been some interesting discussions again around the opiate crisis. So opiates as it relates to CSWB is a great example. A lot of people will say, well, you can't arrest yourself your way out of an opiate crisis. Well, of course you can't, but that doesn't mean that nobody should be arrested because if you want to tell me, oh, well, let's just send social workers and addictions counselors and emergency responders into tent cities,
00:28:12
Speaker
in the northeast of Edmonton. Well, they would refuse to go. It's simply too dangerous for these types of first responders and social workers
00:28:24
Speaker
to go into communities where there's very often weapons, knives, bear spray, and so forth in these tents. Gangs are running the drugs and stealing money from the people living in the tents and don't want anybody in there to solve any problems. And organized crime are the ones pumping the drugs through. You need to add an enforcement pillar to support the work of those agencies so that together they become almost like a filter.
00:28:51
Speaker
in that the police are there to filter out the harder elements within a tent city, arrest people who are part of either gangs or organized crime or who are very violent and beyond any form of counseling or addictions therapy. And then with that sort of filter run through the other filters in CSWB, psychiatric services, addictions counselors and so forth can seek out those who are essentially
00:29:21
Speaker
they are able to reach safely for treatment. They all have to work together. So that's been encouraging in Edmonton so far. They've got huge problems ahead of them, though.
Conclusion and Contact Information
00:29:31
Speaker
It's a lot to take in. I want to thank you, Michael Kempa, for being on the program today. Very interesting discussion. We could talk about it for ages. We might have to have you back because
00:29:42
Speaker
I'm afraid to say this ain't going anywhere. It's going to be a very important societal discussion. I do want to thank our sponsors once again, Municipal Solutions, John Mutton and the team. You can find them at municipalsolutions.ca and KWM Consulting.
00:29:59
Speaker
go to KWMconsulting.com, or I'm going to get the phone number right this time. 416-728-8287. Phone Kelly Mitchell directly. See us as well on 100th Bay Radio or listen to us at least 100thbayradio.com every Saturday morning. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again in just a few days.