Canada's crime rate lowest since 1972 posted:

Canada's police services are once again reporting fewer crimes, a continuing trend that has cut the national crime rate to its lowest level since 1972.

Statistics Canada says the police-reported crime rate fell by three per cent in 2012 compared with the previous year.

The severity of crimes committed was also down by three per cent in 2012, according to StatsCan's Crime Severity Index (CSI), a tool used to measure the seriousness of crimes based on the length of sentences handed down by the courts. More serious crimes, those that result in longer sentences, have a greater impact on changes to the index.

Police-reported crime has been on a steady decline since peaking in 1991.

Police services reported nearly two million incidents involving criminal activity in 2012, roughly 36,000 fewer than in the previous year.

"The police-reported crime rate has followed a downward trend, and, in 2012, reached its lowest level since 1972," Statistics Canada said in its latest report.

"The CSI was down 28 per cent over the 10 years since 2002."

Although there has been a trend toward a reduced crime rate and fewer severe crimes, spending on criminal justice continues to rise.

Also, the Conservatives have introduced at least 30 bills designed to crack down on crime since Prime Minister Stephen Harper won power in 2006.

Per capita spending on criminal justice — including federal and provincial jails, court costs and policing — climbed 23 per cent over the last decade, the Parliamentary budget office reported in March.

The report put the price tag at $20.3 billion in 2011-12, with roughly three quarters of that total carried by the provinces and municipalities.

Both the police-reported crime rate and the CSI fell in most provinces last year, although rates increased in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and the territories.

Saskatchewan reported the biggest decline in its crime rate, but still had the highest rate and CSI among the provinces.

Crime rates, and the severity of crimes as in previous years, were higher in the territories and the western provinces.

Ontario police services reported the lowest crime rate and CSI.

Blade_of_tyshalle posted:

Because Aline was prowling the streets with a soapstone inuit carving, doling out justice as she saw fit?

Fine-able Offense posted:

I thought the dirty little secret of the social sciences was that it's probably at least partially tied to legalizing abortion? It's been a while since I read any of those journals, mind you.

quote:

IN 1994, RICK NEVIN WAS A CONSULTANT working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.

But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might be missing something. A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too?

That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.

It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of…nothing. Nevin's paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it's easy to see why—Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What's more, a single correlation between two curves isn't all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the '80s and '90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.

As it turns out, however, a few hundred miles north someone was doing just that. In the late '90s, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was a graduate student at Harvard casting around for a dissertation topic that eventually became a study she published in 2007 as a public health policy professor at Amherst. "I learned about lead because I was pregnant and living in old housing in Harvard Square," she told me, and after attending a talk where future Freakonomics star Levitt outlined his abortion/crime theory, she started thinking about lead and crime. Although the association seemed plausible, she wanted to find out whether increased lead exposure caused increases in crime. But how?

The answer, it turned out, involved "several months of cold calling" to find lead emissions data at the state level. During the '70s and '80s, the introduction of the catalytic converter, combined with increasingly stringent Environmental Protection Agency rules, steadily reduced the amount of leaded gasoline used in America, but Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn't uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.

Meanwhile, Nevin had kept busy as well, and in 2007 he published a new paper looking at crime trends around the world (PDF). This way, he could make sure the close match he'd found between the lead curve and the crime curve wasn't just a coincidence. Sure, maybe the real culprit in the United States was something else happening at the exact same time, but what are the odds of that same something happening at several different times in several different countries?

Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one."

Just this year, Tulane University researcher Howard Mielke published a paper with demographer Sammy Zahran on the correlation of lead and crime at the city level. They studied six US cities that had both good crime data and good lead data going back to the '50s, and they found a good fit in every single one. In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. "When they overlay them with crime maps," he told me, "they realize they match up."

Fine-able Offense posted:

I thought the dirty little secret of the social sciences was that it's probably at least partially tied to legalizing abortion? It's been a while since I read any of those journals, mind you.

JoelJoel posted:

This was a position, I believe, introduced by the book Freakonomics (or at least popularized by it). Can't look it up at the moment, but it has largely been debunked (or at least the weight attributed to the effect) as being far too simplistic and not having adequate data. Causation correlation and all.

Fine-able Offense posted:

Fair enough, it wouldn't surprise me if it was a combination of many things (including lead, apparently!), though it also won't surprise me if less unwanted kids growing up hard played a small role too.

Helsing posted:

Helsing posted:

Another theory that has gained some traction links violent crime with leaded gasoline:




I really don't have the level of knowledge to evaluate whether this makes any sense but the data is at least superficially impressive.

The really humbling reality of the drop in crime is that we simply don't know what exactly caused it. We can make educated guessed but its one of those many examples of a hugely significant social phenomena that is very hard to pin down exactly.

quote:

Yes, lead poisoning could really be a cause of violent crime
It seems crazy, but the evidence about lead is stacking up. Behind crimes that have destroyed so many lives, is there a much greater crime?

At first it seemed preposterous. The hypothesis was so exotic that I laughed. The rise and fall of violent crime during the second half of the 20th century and first years of the 21st were caused, it proposed, not by changes in policing or imprisonment, single parenthood, recession, crack cocaine or the legalisation of abortion, but mainly by … lead.

I don't mean bullets. The crime waves that afflicted many parts of the world and then, against all predictions, collapsed, were ascribed, in an article published by Mother Jones last week, to the rise and fall in the use of lead-based paint and leaded petrol.

It's ridiculous – until you see the evidence. Studies between cities, states and nations show that the rise and fall in crime follows, with a roughly 20-year lag, the rise and fall in the exposure of infants to trace quantities of lead. But all that gives us is correlation: an association that could be coincidental. The Mother Jones article, which is based on several scientific papers, claimed causation.

I began by reading the papers. Do they say what the article claims? They do. Then I looked up the citations: the discussion of those papers in the scientific literature. The three whose citations I checked have been mentioned, between them, 301 times. I went through all these papers (except the handful in foreign languages), as well as dozens of others. To my astonishment, I could find just one study attacking the thesis, and this was sponsored by the Ethyl Corporation, which happens to have been a major manufacturer of the petrol additive tetraethyl lead. I found many more supporting it. Crazy as this seems, it really does look as if lead poisoning could be the major cause of the rise and fall of violent crime.

The curve is much the same in all the countries these papers have studied. Lead was withdrawn first from paint and then from petrol at different times in different places (beginning in the 1970s in the US in the case of petrol, and the 1990s in many parts of Europe), yet despite these different times and different circumstances, the pattern is the same: violent crime peaks around 20 years after lead pollution peaks. The crime rates in big and small cities in the US, once wildly different, have now converged, also some 20 years after the phase-out.

Nothing else seems to explain these trends. The researchers have taken great pains to correct for the obvious complicating variables: social, economic and legal factors. One paper found, after 15 variables had been taken into account, a four-fold increase in homicides in US counties with the highest lead pollution. Another discovered that lead levels appeared to explain 90% of the difference in rates of aggravated assault between US cities.

A study in Cincinnati finds that young people prosecuted for delinquency are four times more likely than the general population to have high levels of lead in their bones. A meta-analysis (a study of studies) of 19 papers found no evidence that other factors could explain the correlation between exposure to lead and conduct problems in young people.

Is it really so surprising that a highly potent nerve toxin causes behavioural change? The devastating and permanent impacts of even very low levels of lead on IQ have been known for many decades. Behavioural effects were first documented in 1943: infants who had tragically chewed the leaded paint off the railings of their cots were found, years after they had recovered from acute poisoning, to be highly disposed to aggression and violence.

Lead poisoning in infancy, even at very low levels, impairs the development of those parts of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex) that regulate behaviour and mood. The effect is stronger in boys than in girls. Lead poisoning is associated with attention deficit disorder, impulsiveness, aggression and, according to one paper, psychopathy. Lead is so toxic that it is unsafe at any level.

Because they were more likely to live in inner cities, in unrenovated housing whose lead paint was peeling and beside busy roads, African Americans have been subjected to higher average levels of lead poisoning than white Americans. One study, published in 1986, found that 18% of white children but 52% of black children in the US had over 20 milligrammes per decilitre of lead in their blood; another found that, between 1976 and 1980, black infants were eight times more likely to be carrying the horrendous load of 40mg/dl. This, two papers propose, could explain much of the difference in crime rates between black and white Americans, and the supposed difference in IQ trumpeted by the book The Bell Curve.

There is only one remaining manufacturer of tetraethyl lead on earth. It's based in Ellesmere Port in Britain, and it's called Innospec. The product has long been banned from general sale in the UK, but the company admits on its website that it's still selling this poison to other countries. Innospec refuses to talk to me, but other reports claim that tetraethyl lead is being exported to Afghanistan, Algeria, Burma, Iraq, North Korea, Sierra Leone and Yemen, countries afflicted either by chaos or by governments who don't give a drat about their people.

In 2010 the company admitted that, under the name Associated Octel, it had paid millions of dollars in bribes to officials in Iraq and Indonesia to be allowed to continue, at immense profit, selling tetratethyl lead. Through an agreement with the British and American courts, Innospec was let off so lightly that Lord Justice Thomas complained that "no such arrangement should be made again". God knows how many lives this firm has ruined.

The UK government tells me that because tetraethyl lead is not on the European list of controlled exports, there is nothing to prevent Innospec from selling to whoever it wants. There's a term for this: environmental racism.

If it is true that lead pollution, whose wider impacts have been recognised for decades, has driven the rise and fall of violence, then there lies, behind the crimes that have destroyed so many lives and filled so many prisons, a much greater crime.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent-crime-lead-poisoning-british-export

Blade_of_tyshalle posted:

And what about the Canadian pornography industry? This would be a major blow, forcing them down on their knees as the government regulatory bodies have nonconcentual intercourse with them.

sbaldrick posted:

that's my story of Canada's porn industry.

By David Pugliese, OTTAWA CITIZEN July 25, 2013 posted:

OTTAWA — The Conservative government has kick-started an $800-million program to buy army trucks, asking companies to put in new bids for the project that has over the years been plagued by numerous problems.

The program to replace rusting 1980s-era military transport trucks was originally announced in 2006 by then-defence minister Gordon O’Connor. But the project has now fallen more than seven years behind schedule.

In July 2012 the government shut down a project after the Department of National Defence tried to spend more than $300 million without permission.

DND had received government approval in 2009 to move forward with the $430-million purchase of 1,500 off-the-shelf medium-sized trucks. But in subsequent years department and military officials began adding more capabilities to what they wanted in the vehicles, bumping the estimated cost to between $730 million and $800 million.

In an unprecedented move, DND officials continued on with the acquisition without going back to Treasury Board for approval to cover the extra money, according to industry, military and government representatives. When Treasury Board and government officials discovered what was happening they intervened, shutting down the project last summer just minutes before bidding was to close.

On Wednesday the government reopened bidding and the project called the Standard Military Pattern, or SMP, has been restarted. Military officers told the Citizen that the government approved the Canadian Army’s recommendation to transfer $314 million to the SMP project from another vehicle program that isn’t expected to start for another several years.

Public Works spokesman Sébastien Bois noted in an email Thursday that bidders for the SMP project have until December 17 to submit their proposals.

The SMP contract is expected to be awarded in the fall of 2015. “A bidders’ conference will take place in the National Capital Region in September 2013,” Bois added.

The trucks were originally supposed to be delivered in 2008 but that was later delayed to 2014. No details were provided on when the trucks might be delivered under the new process. But some industry representatives have privately noted that it could take between one to two years for the first trucks to arrive.

Some companies are already indicating their intent to bid. The U.S.-based Oshkosh Defense says it will use its Canadian network of suppliers and assembly capabilities for SMP. Program management and other aspects of its bid will be handled out of the firm’s Ottawa office.

“By developing a nationwide network of suppliers, Oshkosh Defense is well-positioned to support Canadian vehicle modernization strategy and bring measurable benefits to the Canadian economy,” John Urias, president of Oshkosh Defense, said in a statement.

The SMP project has been considered a priority because the army vehicles they were to replace have become a safety hazard, with faulty brakes and excessive rust.

But the project has faced numerous problems over the years. In 2008 and 2009, infighting between army and DND officials over the requirements for the trucks led to further delays. At the time, DND issued an email statement: “The project is not in trouble.”

The project has also had to be restarted twice after going off the rails both in 2011 and 2012.

The ongoing issues have prompted some industry representatives to privately question why the government’s procurement system can’t handle a relatively straightforward purchase of 1,500 army trucks. Others have pointed to it as an example of Canada’s failing military procurement system.

In 2004 the Defence Department warned in an internal report that the new vehicles were needed immediately because the existing truck fleet could be hit by a “catastrophic” failure at any time because of poor brakes and steering systems. Catastrophic failure is used to signify accidents that could involve serious injuries or death.

Army officers have said when the older trucks are being used they are closely monitored for safety issues. The army is also using commercial trucks, modified for military use, and delivered by the U.S.-based Navistar starting in 2009.

Rhobot Mk. II posted:

In case you missed it, DND is finally back on track with procuring trucks for the military:


So glad I'm not working procurement anymore.

Rhobot Mk. II posted:

Words...

2015

Words

Globe and Mail posted:

“I did a little calculation yesterday,” says Stuart Iliffe, a Canadian working in Hong Kong as chief financial officer of publishing house PPP Co. Ltd.

“If I earned $100,000 [all figures Canadian unless noted] in Canada, after tax I would keep $54,000. If I earned $100,000 in Hong Kong, and made use of the married man’s tax allowance, I would keep $90,100.”

colonel_korn posted:

The Post is ostensibly more right-wing and has way more odious columnists writing for them

brucio posted:

Hope Kinsella's not talking about you, TT..

http://warrenkinsella.com/2013/07/an-open-tweet-to-voters-in-ottawa-south/

Pinterest Mom posted:

Margaret Wente writes for the Globe, not the Post.

e: Ugggh, Lysiane Gagnon also writes for the Globe. The Post has a much higher columnist quality.

(The Globe is way way worse. Right-wing passing as common-sense centrism is worse than right-wing honest about being right-wing every day.)

Pinterest Mom posted:

Margaret Wente writes for the Globe, not the Post.

e: Ugggh, Lysiane Gagnon also writes for the Globe. The Post has a much higher columnist quality.

(The Globe is way way worse. Right-wing passing as common-sense centrism is worse than right-wing honest about being right-wing every day.)

Pinterest Mom posted:

Provincial Liberal staffers all get a day off when there's a federal byelection in Toronto too. This is a Thing that happens.

JoelJoel posted:

The Globe positions itself as something it isn't, which is infinitely more frustrating.

JoelJoel posted:

Is there some justification?

bunnyofdoom posted:

As much as I would hate to step in here, no, it's not refering to TT. He's actually fully employed and paid by the candidate.

pokeyman posted:

What's the source for how The Globe positions itself? I have a hard time determining whether they're true to their word because I haven't read their word on it.

JoelJoel posted:

If you're asking for the about section on their website that says "we are the result of a merger of an elitist liberal paper and a tory paper but consistently endorse the Liberal party or the PC party (up until recently)" then I think you need to reevaluate your life. They are juxtaposed to the National Post as our national newspapers, and in relative terms they are, in most ways, left of the Post (I did not say they were left). Yes, they endorsed the CPC in the last three (or four?) elections, but only the Star didn't.

Like any organization, the newspaper has a history and record. In any case, the argument doesn't matter because both papers espouse the same nonsense, punctuated by awful op eds (and the far-too-infrequent good ones), terrible comment sections, a dwindling readership, and lack of any creative, forward thinking. Plus they all worship All Might Economy!

pokeyman posted:

The charges laid were hypocrisy and dishonesty. I don't see any evidence for either. If y'all just complained about the paper being lovely then the conviction would be quick.

Also note I haven't disagreed with anything you've written here.