Four years after the “Summer of the Gun”, Toronto police Chief Bill Blair is celebrating a nearly 30 percent overall drop in crime.
“We have experienced crime reduction numbers in this city that are without precedence anywhere in North America,” Blair said.
But, this downward trend in crime statistics is being documented in cities across Canada and the United States. The most recent study by Statistics Canada shows double-digit declines in Criminal Code offences in Winnipeg, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, while Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton showed decreases of more than 5 per cent.
In the United States, the Bureau of Justice has recorded steady decreases in both property and violent crime in New York, Detroit and Chicago over the past 10 years.
A score of scholars have produced a wide variety of theories to explain the drop, but none explain why Canada also has seen such improvement…
(Read the story in the Toronto Sun)
(READ this GNN feature story for more success stories in the US: Crime in US Drops Significantly, Despite Economic Downturn