Crime and Safety in Winnipeg 2022 Part 2

The head of the police union has been calling the police chief's recent news conference an insufficient response. Criminologists and some councillors have been saying cameras and more police boots on the ground will not work. That is a pretty wide spectrum there at least in terms of policing. The spectrum widens even further for those who wish to defund the police or end policing altogether. It is worth noting that a 2020 study by the Washington Post on 60 years of data in the U.S. showed no correlation up or down for crime on per capita spending.

And Winnipeg does spend a lot. Nearly 2.000 work in policing in Winnipeg and they and emergency services are run off their feet as the city consistently has some of the most violence and crime in the nation. As a line item in the city budget, the ratio of police spending goes up every year above inflation while other spending fails to keep pace. The argument that 50 or 200 police additional officers hired can help bring crime down might not bear fruit, especially if other services are left to whither like streets and transportation and parks and recreation. 

A rising misery index could very well push a flight pattern of people outside city limits. Many police themselves live outside the city. How many? The city doesn't track but when they did, it was a lot. Consider the rules of the past where an officer had to live in his jurisdiction and be able to walk to the station if transportation was down due to storm. The police counter is that we have had mayors who live outside of the country and still are mayor. They have a point.

We see a lot of commuter workers in Winnipeg now. Heads of hospitals and Crowns who head home to B.C. and Quebec every weekend. Heads of companies, professionals, teachers and all manner of folk commute from the exurbs into the city. But what does this do for the city itself? It has a tendency to stretch out the city, hollow it out and in a lot of cases remove the very people who contribute to the health of the city overall. For example, a weekend fundraiser for a major hospital is probably going to be a more successful event if the CEO is present and not calling it in from Quebec. And even if they attend these sometime events, it is the day in and day out being present in the community that is helpful. How do you even really know the city that is paying your salary if you are not present? More to the point, why would you even care?