Kent Roach is a professor of law at the University of Toronto and Cheryl Webster is a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa.
The body count in recent months has been grim and frightening.
Reported crime on Toronto’s transit system increased to more than 1,000 incidents in 2022, up 60 per cent since 2019, even while ridership has declined 30 per cent.
And this was before 16-year-old Gabriel Magalhaes was stabbed to death at a TTC subway station by an unhoused man with many assault convictions who was on probation. It was the fourth homicide on the transit system in less than a year. Nationally, nine police officers have been killed in the line of duty over the same time period.
In response, the provinces are calling for harsher bail laws and the federal government has agreed. Further, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has capitalized on the most recent tragedy by telling Torontonians that they need to vote for a mayor who will put more money into policing to avoid “anarchy in our cities.” Similarly in Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith is adding 100 more police officers, particularly at transit stations, to “restore the streets to safety.”
At best, these are simple solutions. At worst, they are political snake oil.
Take tougher laws governing bail. Canada has dramatically increased its use of pretrial detention, with a 400-per-cent rise in the number of prisoners in remand since the late 1970s. But we are almost certainly not safer. Instead, we are filling our detention centres with more and more non-violent offenders, especially those accused of administration of justice offences. It is hard to imagine that the public sleeps more soundly because people are imprisoned because they failed to abide by a curfew or reside at a particular residence.
The onerous nature of pretrial detention also encourages some innocent individuals to enter false guilty pleas simply to ensure their immediate release from that facility. Remand facilities are notorious for their shocking conditions (overcrowding, frequent lockdowns, triple-bunking) that dramatically raise the “cost” of maintaining one’s innocence. With significant court delays in the processing of criminal cases in Canada, those in detention centres also risk serving more time (while still presumed innocent) than any prison sentence they might receive.
Equally disconcerting, the increased use of pretrial detention exacerbates systemic discrimination, particularly when it comes to Indigenous accused. Notably, most of the 15 remedied guilty pleas in the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions were made by women and racialized people. Just as problematic, detained persons are at increased risk of losing their job and housing, if not also their children, when in pretrial custody. Further, they often experience inmate violence, as well as develop (or intensify) mental-health issues and addictions. These negative consequences are directly associated with the commission of (subsequent) crime.
It is true that time in pretrial custody also means less time in sentenced custody. But it is only the latter that generally has treatment programs (for addiction, mental health, domestic violence, etc.) as well as educational and job training opportunities to address some of the underlying social and individual disadvantages that characterize so many offenders.
Tougher bail laws are, at best, a temporary reprieve and, at worst, a recipe for even less public safety. They also lead to even more court appearances, greater court inefficiency and delay. Taxpayer money could be better spent. More pretrial detention may incapacitate a few who would commit crime. But only for a few months and it may make those subject to it more dangerous and desperate when released. This could create more crime in the long run.
If tougher bail is not the magic bullet, what about more police? Mr. Ford thinks so and has warned Toronto voters not to elect a mayor who supported police “defunding” or more accurately, an earlier motion to transfer 10 per cent of the Toronto police’s billion-dollar budget to other service providers.
Reassuring the public has value. And a greater police presence largely accomplishes this task. It may also dissuade potential offenders from committing a crime in the deployed area. Yet, when police numbers return to normal, crime also returns (if it hasn’t already simply been displaced to other neighbourhoods not targeted by higher police presence). Like greater pretrial detention, the quick fix of more police, even when it works, only works for a short time.
The Toronto police placed 80 more officers on the TTC but only for six weeks and at a cost of $1.7-million a month in overtime. Police officers are expensive. They earn, on average, $120,000 a year. In 2020-21, Canadian jurisdictions spent $16.5-billion on the public police, most of it in salaries. Only 3 per cent of our police personnel are less costly special constables. The TTC itself is hiring community safety officers, security guards and outreach workers. They should study whether this is a cost-effective way to use limited resources to reduce crime and the fears of transit riders.
Gabriel Magalhaes’s grieving mother insightfully provides at least part of the answer: “More needs to be done so that people don’t get to the point where they are in crisis.” She points to the urgent need for social services, better health care and housing as well as civic engagement in the hope that others do not endure “the horrible pain that I am going through right now.”
Drawing on her expertise as a mental-health nurse, Andrea Magalhaes is calling for the type of holistic and preventive approach that should be promoted by the mandated interdisciplinary community health and well-being plans required but, alas, not always funded by the Ontario government. If we are serious about reducing crime, front-end solutions that link vulnerable populations with needed services should be a fiscal priority. The Nova Scotia mass casualty inquiry similarly called on all levels of government to devise and implement communitywide public and mental-health approaches to crime prevention.
Unfortunately, Toronto’s uninspired plan on crime, SafeTO, was long on rhetoric and short on concrete solutions. Many other city plans pointed to the lack of housing as a driver of crime, but at the same time acknowledged that they did not have the tax base to come up with effective remedies. With its 9,000 shelter beds full, Toronto should revisit its inadequate plan that, in 2021, it thought was good enough to last for 10 years.
A good place to start would be another plan proposed by a coalition of Toronto community groups called Rethinking Community Safety. It proposes the type of police retasking – demonized by Mr. Ford – that would reallocate a portion of city resources to organizations that are better positioned to prevent, or at least reduce, the need for police intervention. Most notably, it recommends more supports for the unhoused, the addicted and the mentally ill as a more cost effective and constructive alternative to the 42 police interactions, on average, faced by an unhoused Torontonian each year, as well as the 16,000 tickets given out annually to this unhoused population. It also recognizes that social service organizations, which often have long waiting lists, may be in a better position to respond than the police. This approach can also be fairer to the police, who are not trained or equipped to provide social services. It is also consistent with recent recommendations of the Nova Scotia mass casualty inquiry.
Tightening bail and spending more on the public police are simple solutions that are unlikely to be effective in dealing with rising crime. Indeed, to the extent that more pretrial detention creates or exacerbates criminal propensity, and greater police presence largely displaces problems, such simple solutions could very well make things worse.
We are obviously not advocating for dispensing with police or bail laws. Both play an essential role in ensuring our safety. Rather, they need to be reconceptualized within a wider context that prioritizes prevention rather than reaction. Short-term fixes should be seen as just that – short-term responses that rarely address the underlying problems that ultimately drive most crime.