Fighting Crime? I Don't Think So.

I got up about 4:30 this morning. I wasn’t all that happy about it because I like lying in bed but lately, I’ve been haulin’ butt out of bed at ridiculous hours in the early morning. Sometimes I wonder if it is a function of getting older. Your body needs more sleep but damned if it doesn’t sense the time clock ticking down to eternity and try to rouse you not to waste any more time than necessary.

Anyway, up I got and dragged my butt downstairs to make lunches for Keina and the Maggmeister. This is one of my jobs. I make their lunches and then trundle them off to school and work later in the morning. I don’t actually mind doing it, I do most of the cooking here and Maggie does most of…ok….all of the baking.

I don’t like to bake, it’s way too finicky. Everything has to be measured and it reminds me of filling out a tax return. No estimates, no approximations, you have to follow the rules precisely. I’d rather cook, you don’t measure anything and if you make a mistake, you can just toss in something or other to correct it. Try doing that on your tax return and see how far it gets you.

So I finished the lunches, made myself a fresh Tassimo and went into the living room to catch some news. It was the usual reportage and I sometimes think I could be on Mars for a few weeks and when I returned, the news would be pretty much the same as it was the day before I left. Nothing much changes or if it does, the mainstream media are keeping it to themselves.

I was about to switch channels to the Olympics when a story about license plate theft in Edmonton, Canada caught my attention.

Apparently, the theft of license plates in Alberta’s second largest city is rampant and the police are warning drivers to be careful. They had a constable in full uniform advising the public on different things they should do to protect their plates who then went on to say that crooks were going to be successful nonetheless.

If that’s true, what’s the point of being careful? And while we’re at it, how is the public supposed to be careful about protecting their license plates? The government regulates how and where they are to be attached to your vehicle. Are we supposed to weld them to the car? That won’t work of course because more and more cars are made out of plastic these days which isn’t welder friendly.

Perhaps we could use Krazy Glue although it didn’t work all that well on the ceramic pot we tried to glue back together. Apparently it’s better at suspending a guy in a hard hat from a steel beam like they show you in the commercial.

Perhaps we’re just supposed to sit up all night guarding our car and its precious license plate.

It got me thinking two things. The first was that this is a typical government agency response to an issue that affects the public. Somehow, the inability of the government agency to effectively address and resolve the situation transfers responsibility for it to the public. We become responsible for ensuring that our license plates aren’t stolen or that we don’t get shot in a restaurant by some irate gang member out for revenge.

It’s always us isn’t it? The government screws up the power grid; it’s us that need to change our consumption habits. The courts give a pedophile or an armed robber a suspended sentence, it’s us that is instructed be more careful and to protect ourselves and our property. We’re advised to install better locks and alarm systems although if you get more than two false alarms, the police will send you a bill for their time responding to the call.

I sort of get tired of the attitude to be honest because I have always believed that all that money we pay in taxes for law enforcement and the criminal justice system is supposed to be exactly how ‘we’ decided to be more careful and to protect ourselves. Didn’t we, as a people, hire these guys and guyettes to figure all this out on our behalf and clean up Dodge City? If we needed someone to tell us to be more careful with our license plates, I’m pretty sure we could hire someone for a lot less than a police officer to whine at us.

To be fair, maybe it just got me whining because it’s early in the morning and I was already cranky about being up this early but it did get me thinking about something else.

Every time the Conservatives or some other right of centre group put forward a proposition or legislation to get tougher on crime, the chattering class and the left in general trot out all the statistics in the world to show how crime is actually on the decline.

Really?

Why is it then that we have more gang shootings in our cities than at any other time in our history? Why is it that the Chief of Police in Vancouver warned citizens he couldn’t guarantee their safety from gangs last year? For that matter, why is it that in every city in the country, the police services budget is the one that increases regardless of budget and economic constraints?

Why are we seeing increased security in retail stores, schools, airports and particularly government offices? Is that simply to give tourists a false sense of security or is it just to give the security industry and law enforcement something to do with their time? Why does law enforcement want more warrantless wiretap and search ability?

I believe the stats are manipulated to make it appear as if government in general and law enforcement and the judicial system specifically are doing a great job in reducing crime. The fact is that we aren’t safer today than we were thirty or forty years ago and more of us are the victims of serious crime, up to and including being killed, than ever before.

Last year, an elderly man in our city was beaten to death in broad daylight by a couple of teenage punks when he tried to stop them from stealing a pumpkin outside of a grocery store. More than 1 million children are missing in North America and between 5 and 6 are killed every day by family abuse.

In fact, crimes against children are on the increase. Pedophiles use the Internet to prey on children like its coyotes on a penned-in flock of sheep. Human smuggling is on the increase. Women and children are being sold into in the sex trade in increasing numbers and illegal drug use is rampant.

Break and enters, armed robbery, Internet scams and shoplifting are all on the increase. Not according to the stat reports they trot out every now and then to justify their programs but according to the individual reports that slip out now and then when nobody is paying attention or they think we aren’t listening.

White collar crime is also on the increase. Scams, ponsi schemes and outright theft abound. Even some banks have got in on the action, gleefully breaking the law as they pursue the almighty dollar, yen or Deutch Mark.

Last year, we even had a gang of crooks stealing manhole (person hole, human hole…pick the sewer cover label that works for you) and then selling them for the metal they contained.

You can be pretty confident that when they start stealing manhole covers, crime isn’t on the decrease. Those in authority have simply found ways to manipulate the stats in order to make it appear like they are on top of the situation and that isn’t some paranoid conspiracy theory, it’s just a simple fact.

The government decriminalizes some crimes which has the benefit of reducing crime stats. Many crimes go unreported because law enforcement does little about them. It is pointless, for example, to report a simple break and enter or vandalism to your property and so many don’t. Other crimes are sub-divided. Bullying, road rage incidents, domestic disturbances, uttering threats and spousal abuse are all categorized independently now but they all used to be classified as assault.

Homicide has been replaced by manslaughter, murder, honour killings, battered wife homicide, assisted suicide which has the effect of reducing the murder rate.

Comparisons are done between time periods that put the current stats in the most favourable rate. For example, while it is clear that violent crime has declined slightly over the past five years, it is up significantly compared to thirty years ago.

It’s a sad thing when the best your government can do in order to protect its citizens is to manipulate stats to mislead us but then that’s pretty much how they handle everything isn’t it? According to government our health care system is improving because…..well….. wait times for hip replacement surgeries are down. The fact that more than 2 million Canadians don’t have access to a family physician or that wait times in hospital emergency rooms have doubled is irrelevant. Government takes its victories where it can find them and apparently measures the success of healthcare one hip at a time.

It’s a sad thing and it left me with this one thought. The government requires me to have a license plate on my vehicle. They dictate where and how it will be placed. If crooks are stealing them now, it’s not my problem it’s government’s and they can deal with it. We pay and elect them to prevent this kind of thing don’t we? It’s their job to figure it out and resolve it.

I’m tired of you and me always paying and then being responsible for ensuring we don’t get shot or become the victims of some crook. I suggest government stop manipulating numbers and start dealing with what is rather than what they would like us to believe.

I doubt that will happen though. It occurs to me that government bureaucracies and politicians have been feeding us so much misinformation over the years that they have actually started to believe the gobble-de-gook they trot out.

I don’t mind admitting that it’s a bit of challenge to see how that is going to continue to do us much good in the future so I am resolved not to get too attached to my license plate. I’m not even going to bother memorizing the number on it.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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