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The National Post Viciously Assaults Logic, Criminally Neglects Statistics
Toronto is so going to jail.
“What’s going on in Toronto the Good?” the National Post asks this morning in an article about three bad instances of (alleged) crime over the past week. A better rhetorical question: haven’t we had enough of this?
Not the crime—though all crime is too much, and the past few days have contained some particularly ugly instances. What we should have had enough of is media asserting the exception as the rule, and then, based on that, drawing conclusions like:
These kinds of stories are what make the rest of the country hate Toronto, swear they will never move here and curse this city as a blight on the country. When this is what’s in the Monday morning newcast, you can’t quite blame them.
Actually, that’s a good accidental point at the end there, National Post! There’s little that shapes the perception of Toronto more than the media’s coverage of the city. When it comes to crime, though, there’s little that the media gets more wrong.
So, in the past week: thieves stole $7,000 of valuables from a dying woman (that’s Theft Over $5,000); one teenager stabbed another (that’s Assault); and a man punched a parking enforcement officer (that’s Assault, too).
Are those crimes symptomatic of a larger trend? Let’s take a quick look at the statistics, from the Toronto Police (bearing this disclaimer in mind):
Those numbers in the “YTD2010” and “YTD2009” columns are the year-to-date numbers, apparently accurate to this morning. Measured from this time last year, Assault? Down. Theft Over $5,000? Down. Everything else? Down, except for Murder: there were 11 murders by this point last year, and there have been 11 this year so far, as well.
Granted, year-to-year data can sometimes present a false picture of either dramatically increased or dramatically reduced crime. So let’s frame it like this: are 3,283 reported assaults so far this year, in a city with a population of one thousand times that number, enough to make us a “blight on the country”?
As we showed in Metrocide, our 2008 series on homicides in Toronto, Toronto’s homicide rate didn’t hold a candle to most other cities in North America. By most measures, the city is safer than it was thirty years ago; by most measures, it’s getting safer. It is for precisely those reasons that people should call this kind of reporting out, whether the outlet responsible for it is the Sun or the Post. For crime reporting especially, perception matters. Statistics matter. Three crimes in a week isn’t a blight—it’s a blip.
Metrocide will return this summer.