In BC, the popular myth is that crime is increasing dramaticly.
While crime overall has not fluctated widely over the last reported decade of 1996 to 2005, according to
BC statistic on crime trends, crime rates have dropped overall with property crime dropping from 11 percent to 6.4 percent and violent crime dropping from 1.8 percent to 1.3 percent. Thus violent crime has been reduced by 0.5 percent points (28 percent) while crime against property dropped dramaticly by 4.6 percentage points (41 percent).
With overreporting in the papers, it appears that there is a crime wave of drug crime, and the statistics show that drug crime has risen from 0.5 percent to 0.6 percent, an increase of 20 percent. Quite possibly, the reason why violent crime and property crime rates fell during this period has to do with the rise in population, which supplied more potential drug addicts and even more manufacturers and traffickers, who probably rose out of poverty. As a result, drug criminals' growing affluence reduced both property crime and violence. During this same period, sangerous weapons offences increased by 35 percent from about 0.1 percent to 0.135 percent - which might indicate a rising sense of caution moderated by a 500 percent increase in gambling offences and 250 percent increase in prostitution (possibly in an effort to launder money, and more likely to show off such affluence).
Overall too, the number of youths being charges for all crime has dropped from 21 percent of all charges to 11 percent. This may reflect more the trend of the criminal population getting older rather than youth not getting into crime. The only crimes that are steadily rising are basically the moral ones, though, with petty crimes rising from 4.8 percent to 5 percent. Furthermore, in 1996, one in five persons would have been convicted of a crime while 10 years later, this decreased dramaticly to less than one person in seven. Where formerly out of 100 people, 20 would be criminals in 1996, by 2005 that dropped to about 15 people out of 100.
Over the same period of time,
BC's population increased from 3,874,276 in 1996 to 4.260.246 in 2005. Quite possibly, the majority of the almost 400,000 new people in BC are too young to be committing crimes or are mainly law abiding.
Therefore, the truth is, despite (or maybe because of) the 20 percent in drug crime charges, there's been a record 25 percent reduction in overall crime.
IMHO, if the welfare rates were phased out in favour of a
liberal Universal Basic Income and associated simple income tax with no caps on part-time income for UBI recipients in order to reduce poverty, then I'd bet drug crime offenses will become slightly reduced to about 0.45 percent and violent crime as well as property crime will reduce even further to just under 1 percent for the former and under 6 percent for the latter. However, I still feel that petty crime might stay level at 4.5 percent since there will always be a rising number of people falling into the underclass due to a dropout effect caused by compulsory public education and white collar predation.
Dec 21, 07
