By Fiona Hughes
Staff writer

While you wouldn’t know it from watching the 6 o’clock news, crime across Canada is on the decrease.

According to Vancouver crime statistics, the number of reported break-ins—residential, commerical and vehicle)—fell 28 per cent from 1998 to 2000, while violent crimes remained steady at just under 4,000 annually for the last three years.

The drop has prompted city councillor Sam Sullivan to ask why every retiring police officer must be replaced and more added to the Vancouver Police Department. But he’s a lone voice on council, which recently voted to give the department an additional $1 million to hire more personnel.

"My feeling is we do not need to be expanding our police force," Sullivan says. "In fact, we could probably reduce it in some measure."

The police, predictably, disagree. Sgt. Ron Fairweather, who heads up the Vancouver Police Department’s recruiting unit, says more officers are needed as criminals become smarter.

"When you look at the crimes occurring, they’re much more complex than they used to be and so is the evidence-gathering," Fairweather said.

"It was not too long ago that we’d never heard of DNA evidence. Just the scrutiny, the investigation has to be more precise and more methodical."

That sounds like a simple case of an increase in paperwork to Sullivan, who questions the assumption that more policing is society’s best defense against crime. Instead, since the Mayor’s Coalition for Crime Prevention and Drug Treatment found that about 70 to 90 per cent of crime is related to illegal drugs, he says the city would do better to focus resources on solving its drug woes, which he says is not a criminal problem but a health and economic one.

"Don’t get me wrong—we need good police and well-paid police," Sullivan says, "[but] the police do not prevent crime. Any criminologist will tell you that there is no relation between police and crime. Police is what happens after the crime."

Det. Scott Driemel, police media liaison, takes exception to the idea police don’t prevent crime. "Having walked the beat for several years, you know [criminals] won’t do something when you’re there on the corner, so we do prevent crime," he said.

"But what you’re talking about is enforcement versus social issues and that starts to get very political. Drugs are a federal offence... that being said whose responsibility is it? We have a problem in Vancouver and, we, as the police for the city for Vancouver have to deal with it. We have to be involved."

Driemel concedes, however, that if the drug problem were eradicated, the force could be reduced and resources refocused on new areas of crime that are proving to be chronic and complex, such as cyber crime.

"At the moment we’re strapped pretty thin," he says. "People who’ve had their car or home broken into have to wait several hours before they file a report."

Neil Boyd, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University, agrees that police resources should be redirected. "There are many useful things police do but enforcing drug laws is not one of them," Boyd says. "With our drug situation, it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of money on officers whose sole duty has to do with drugs. To me, it’s not a question of a bigger or smaller force but what are they doing to [alleviate] the problem."

Sullivan says he changed his mind about the value of hiring extra police officers after council voted three years ago to raise property taxes by one per cent to put an extra 75 to 100 police officers on the streets of the Downtown Eastside. The $3-million hiring spree was one component of the Mayor’s Coalition paper, released in 1998.

"We hired a whole bunch of police to do these patrols and there has been pretty well no result or no benefit whatsoever for our three million bucks," he says. "I can say fairly and confidently that the people in Chinatown don’t believe we even have the police there. They can’t tell any difference. I look at what we’re doing in the Downtown Eastside as what the U.S. did in Vietnam. You take your best people, throw them into a war zone but they don’t know what they’re there for. What were they supposed to do? Nobody can tell me that. They were told to stabilize the area, but what does that mean?"

Sullivan’s theory about the lack of connection between police and crime isn’t new. Studies on the strength of police forces and crime rates over the last few decades have consistently proven that crime does not drop when the number of officers increases.

In Police for the Future, David Bayley—a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the State University in Albany, N.Y.—compares police forces and crime rates in countries around the world, including Canada.

"The plain but disconcerting fact is that differences in crime rates cannot be attributed to variations in the number of police," Bayley writes.

"Since World War II, increases in the numbers of police have closely paralleled increases in crime rates. Detailed analysis has shown that communities hire more police when they see crime rates rising. But this is a desperate game of catch-up that has no effect on the rate of increased in crime. Additional police officers do not slow, even temporarily, the rate of increase."

Surprisingly, crime rates are also unaffected when police presence is suddenly reduced in communities due to strikes or significant layoffs resulting from budgetary crises, Bayley adds.

While he maintains he’s not anti-authority or anti-police, Sullivan insists it’s time to rethink the role of police. "When you look at the crime rate, the majority of crimes are committed by males 25 and under. You’re better off teaching these men civil behaviour and investing money in things like libraries and community centres. That would be a tremendous investment.

"I’d like to see resources spent on future problems like [early childhood development] when you can help someone before they turn into a criminal. I’d like to sacrifice a little of our comfort level and make a difference at another level."