Thursday, August 05, 2010

Doris' war on invisible crime stats - Part 2


Further to Doris' war on invisible crime stats ...

Yesterday's Con memo: “Let’s be clear, unlike the Liberals, we do not use statistics as an excuse to ignore Canadians’ concerns about crime. As far as our government is concerned, one victim of crime is one too many.”

Quite so. At Tuesday's presser, Doris addressed :

"crimes like home invasion with aggravated assault, which has to be one of the most grievous types of crimes you can think of, people’s houses being broken into and people, in many cases, senior citizens, being grievously assaulted"

While one senior's home invasion is indeed one senior's home invasion too many, you can see why the Cons are not too keen to use statistics in their efforts to shore up the wrinkly vote :

Statscan : Police-reported robbery in Canada, 2008

Break and enters were at their lowest level in 40 years, dropping by 9%.

In 2008, 6% of victims involved in a home invasion were 65 years or older, compared to 3% who were robbed on the street or other outdoor public location and 2% who were robbed in a commercial or institutional establishment. About 2% of victims of total violent crime in 2008 were 65 years or older."

Yeah, screw the stats, let's just go with feelings.

Day continues on about home invasions :

"...previously there were too many cases when those were addressed with what’s called conditional sentencing. That means the criminals in that case get sent home. They don’t have to go to jail."

John Geddes at Maclean's asked Day's office for material supporting his statement about conditional sentences. Amusingly they sent back StatsCan data that refutes their position :

"So far, they have only passed along the broad Statistics Canada data on criminal courts, which shows that 4.4 per cent of adult criminal convictions result in conditional sentences. There’s nothing in the data that I can see, though, to shore up Day’s version of reality."

Just another day in Day's version of reality.

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2 comments:

Kev said...

Just think how much crime we could prevent by putting 9.5 billion into substance abuse programs and mental health care.

The stats that the Cons hate so much show that the vast majority of inmates have been abused as children, have substance abuse problems and/or mental health issues.

Alison said...

Yeah. Doris prefers to follow the US pattern.

20% of US inmates are sexually abused, 16% suffer mental illnesses and another 16% are kids under 18. About half a million are inside on drug offences alone. Of the 700,000 released every year, more than half return within three years...

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