What do we know about crime and policing?

The province with the highest crime rate is Saskatchewan. Ontario and Quebec have the lowest crime rates. In Canada, Quebec City is the safest city in which to live; Regina has the highest crime rate.
Chasing down crime news is not our favourite job and although city media is criticized for using crime stories to sell papers, small town community newspapers have to look elsewhere for hot stories.
Stories that might not be getting much attention from you are the increasing police budgets in area municipalities. In Hawkesbury, residents are facing a $500,000 increase, or a budget that will increase to $3.8 million.
We will have to fill you in when updated local crime statistics are available; it will be interesting to see if our region follows the national trend, which is a three to five per cent decrease in crime for the past few years. In 2006, the crime rate had reached its lowest point in more than 25 years.
You are probably aware of our complaint that we can go weeks without any crime reports from local police and in detachments which are understaffed, one can understand that preparing press releases is not at the top of officers' to-do lists.
But it is worth considering that we have a system where police are in control of what is released and when it is released and that most of the information we receive is about crimes already committed.
It is information about the consequences of crime that we lack. Rarely do we report on sentencing, hearings, bail being set but most small newspaper staffs would be hard-pressed to keep a journalist parked at the courthouse around the clock.
Recent announcements that a ring of thieves which may have been connected to home invasions certainly got people talking. At the time of the home invasion, little information was released and as we wrote about that crime, we realized that we might be frightening people.
While that is not our intent, reporting the news and informing you so that you can take more precautions is something that one could interpret as being for the common good. Yet another reason to report crime is that it enables the public to assist in crime prevention, understand the difficulties of policing and perhaps gauge the public's need for policing. One could guess that the number of crime reports makes it easier for the police to ask for a bigger slice of the municipal budget.
Do you feel that you have a good understanding of crime in our communities? For our part, we feel we could do better.
It's dangerous out there, we know. But television and to some extent, daily city newspapers may be sending that message out in the way they report crime.
Reporting of crime should always be in the context of public interest. Now all we have to do is come up with a reliable system for obtaining the information.
L.S.