Quote:
Originally Posted by Envitro
That's a bit extreme, and there's no evidence of that at all.
They want the extra money to hire more bodies, not buy armoured tanks, whatever those are in police terms 
Crime is on the rise, people are concerned, those are pure stats.
More boots on the ground may make some people feel safer, and may reduce crime or catch the criminals after the fact.
Decreasing the budget, re-allocating, or defunding the police is guaranteed to have the opposite effect. |
It's an incredibly complex and multi-factorial thing to consider. I'm not sure there is actually much correlation between number of cops and volume of crime...
For instance, Edmonton has 190 cops per 100k population compared to Calgary with 170/100k...yet Edmonton's crime severity index is much higher (98 vs. 65.7 in YYC)
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/...0/t018-eng.htm
Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg are all higher in both metrics
Ottawa and Quebec City are lower in both.
I'm not arguing any causality in any of this, there are a ton of factors that make it difficult to compare different places.
I suppose we could ask the same questions about firefighters...do more firefighters = fewer fires? Perhaps a marginal difference based on their community outreach/education work, but that leads to a similar resourcing question - are fully trained firefighters the best bang for your buck in that regard? (of course firefighters do more than just fires).