Opinion: Public sentiments on Vancouver’s crime wave matter

Nov 24 2022, 11:21 pm

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Adam Zivo, who is an international journalist and LGBTQ2S+ activist. He is best known for his weekly National Post column, his on-the-ground coverage of the war in Ukraine, and for founding the LoveisLoveisLove campaign. Zivo’s work has also appeared in the Washington Examiner, Xtra Magazine, and Ottawa Citizen, among other publications.


New polling data shows that an overwhelming majority of Vancouverites feel that crime is getting worse and that homelessness is to blame. The city’s crime wave is real, even if a contingent of politicians and activists want to gaslight Vancouverites into believing otherwise.

Earlier this month, a poll conducted by Leger for Postmedia showed that 58% of Canadians believe that homelessness is an issue in their community, 46% feel less safe in their community because of homelessness, and 39% believe that homelessness has led to more violence in their community.

In British Columbia, the numbers are much worse: 87% felt that homeless was an issue, 70% felt less safe, and 72% felt that homelessness had led to more local violence.

These numbers are astounding – but let’s dive deeper into them.

First, let’s illustrate a point about statistics using a thought experiment. Imagine that, when polling 100 people, 20% tell you that they recently felt threatened and 10% tell you that they were recently punched in the face.

You can fairly assume that almost all of the people who were punched in the face belong to the subpopulation of respondents who said they’d felt threatened – because it’s hard to imagine that someone was punched in the face but didn’t feel threatened.

So now you have 20 people who felt threatened, of which 10 were punched in the face, and 80 people who did not feel threatened, of which zero were punched in the face. So the face-punching rate is 50% for the first group and 0% for the second group. Making these kinds of distinctions gives more insight than simply looking at the 10% average face-punching rate across the entire population.

Now let’s apply that kind of approach to the Leger poll. The full data behind the poll isn’t publicly available, so we have to rely on educated guesses. It seems safe to assume that an overwhelming majority of Canadians who had concerns about their personal safety, or perceived increased violence, also said that homelessness was an issue — for the sake of simplicity, let’s say there’s a 100% overlap (reality is messier, but no need to get bogged down in a methodological quagmire right now).

homeless leger poll

Leger

homeless leger poll

Adam Zivo/Daily Hive

homeless diagram

Adam Zivo/Daily Hive

homeless diagram

Adam Zivo/Daily Hive

Under our 100% overlap assumption, it seems that of the 58% of Canadians who feel that homelessness is an issue in their community, roughly 79% felt less safe in their community and 67% perceived more community violence.

If you look at just BC, of the 87% of respondents who felt that homelessness was an issue, roughly 80% felt less safe and 83% perceived more community violence.

What can we tell from this? Well, first of all, if you’re a British Columbian who believes that homelessness is an issue, you’re as likely to feel unsafe as the average Canadian (79% vs 80%). Homelessness is obviously a much larger issue in BC, but the rate at which people feel unsafe seems consistent.

However, it seems that British Columbians who expressed concerns about homelessness were much more likely to be motivated by community violence compared to the average Canadian (83% vs 67%).

Another interesting thing: in the Canada-wide numbers, the number of people who feel unsafe (79%) is higher than the number of people who perceive increased community violence (67%).

So some portion of Canadians seem to feel unsafe because of homelessness, even if homelessness hasn’t increased community violence – this group seems somewhat paranoid about homeless people. We can call them “Karens.”

Homeless advocates like to argue that public safety concerns predominantly come from Karens. However, while Karens exist, they seem to constitute only around 15% of the Canadians who say they feel unsafe because of homelessness.

However, in BC, the Karen population doesn’t seem significant at all.

The number of British Columbians who said they feel unsafe was almost the same as the number who said they perceived increased community violence. Therefore, the number of Karens (people who feel unsafe but don’t perceive increased violence) seems negligible. Smearing public safety advocates as “Karens” doesn’t seem to really work in BC.

Now, keep in mind, all of the analysis presented so far is just based on one poll – and polls can be wrong. That’s why it matters that Angus Reid conducted a separate poll in October that’s largely consistent with the Leger findings.

In the Angus Reid poll, respondents were asked to identify which two issues were most important to them. Housing policy dominated Vancouverites’ concerns, with 57% listing it as a top two priority. However, homelessness and poverty came second at 38%, followed by crime and safety at 28%. As well, 59% of Vancouverites said that crime has increased in the past five years, compared to only 12% who believed it has decreased. Another 27% felt that crime had stayed the same.

Taking the Angus and Leger polls together, it seems fair to estimate that roughly two-thirds of Vancouverites are feeling deeply distressed about violent homelessness and crime.

Homeless advocates have often argued that the crime wave is just a hallucination — something conjured up in the minds of confused citizens whose minds have been addled by fear-obsessed media. To back their claim, these advocates point to the fact that overall crime rates in Vancouver have been decreasing for years.

But their arguments are flawed. The pandemic caused many people to work from home, which denied criminals opportunities to commit break and enters and auto thefts. Those types of crimes subsequently plummeted and, as they constitute a large portion of overall crime, dragged down aggregate numbers.

However, more severe crimes have spiked, particularly around homeless encampments. Over the past few months, near the Hastings Street encampment, there was a 45% increase in serious assaults and assaults involving weapons, as well as a 60% increase in weapons offences. As these severe crimes account for only a small minority of total crime, these spikes have had less of an impact on aggregate numbers.

The crime wave is real – don’t let anyone mislead you otherwise. But how do people think it’s being handled?

The Angus poll shows that 90% of Vancouverites feel that the municipal government has done either a poor or very poor job on homelessness and poverty, and 70% similarly disapprove of how the government is handling crime and safety.

The Leger poll is similarly withering. In BC, 8% say that the government’s actions on homelessness are making things better, while 20% say that the government is making things worse. Also, 39% said that the government has had no impact, positive or negative, while 21% are unaware that the government is doing anything about homelessness at all.

Crucially, both polls showed a strong appetite for tackling the root causes of homelessness.

The Angus poll asked whether police funding should be put towards social supports (i.e. mental health, housing) or increased policing in high-crime neighbourhoods. The survey showed 70% of Vancouverites chose social support investments over increased policing.

homeless angus reid

Angus Reid

That may imply low support for policing, but that’s only because the poll presented social welfare and extra policing as mutually exclusive options. In contrast, Leger’s poll didn’t frame these two sets of solutions as mutually exclusive – and, as a result, there was significantly higher support for both policing and social welfare. People didn’t want to be forced to choose between one or the other – they wanted both.

The Leger results show that overwhelming majorities of British Columbians want additional funding for mental health (88%), shelters (87%), and homeless-targeted employment programs (80%). And, at the same time, British Columbians wanted more policing (79%), including in areas experiencing homelessness (75%), and generally supported the use of police to clear homeless encampments (61%).

Notably, the pro-policing sentiment was higher in BC than in other parts of the country. Compared to the Canadian average, British Columbians were moderately more supportive of extra policing (79% vs 69%) but much more supportive of using police to clear homeless encampments (61% vs 42%).

homeless leger poll

Leger

This approach makes sense. There’s nothing inconsistent about simultaneously supporting increased policing and more investment into social programs. Keeping communities, particularly low-income ones, safe from crime is a social justice issue. So is addressing the root causes of homelessness. Evidently, most British Columbians especially feel that the two go hand in hand.

In July, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) published statistics about 44 then-recent cases of stranger attacks. Mental health was a factor in 73% of these attacks — and 53% of the cases involved an individual who had previously been apprehended under the Mental Health Act. However, 60% of the attackers had previously been charged with violent crimes and the 40 suspects involved in the survey had over 3,800 prior interactions with the police (of which half were with the VPD).

These kinds of numbers make it clear that more investment in mental health is sorely needed. That could, and should, include institutionalizing individuals who are dangerously mentally ill and repeatedly commit violent offences.

Yet they also illustrate the case for more policing. If a small number of individuals can repeatedly commit violent crimes and remain on the streets, then BC’s justice system is broken. Until the province pulls itself together and commits to separating violent offenders from the public, whether that be in jails or mental health asylums, more police will be needed on the ground to keep the peace.

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