COPS and sobbers

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If you reduced all the verbiage about crime reduction in Winnipeg into a single, ridiculous statement, you'd be left with "after-school basketball prevents homicide."

Yes, it's idiotic. But faced with the daunting task of appearing to be doing something -- anything -- to prevent violent crime and make Winnipeggers feel safer, political leaders resort to the simplest imaginable concept. This is not because elected officials believe voters are stupid, but because politicians want to believe there are simple answers to complex problems.

As a result, the pat answer to the all-but-intractable challenge posed by urban crime reduction is after-school basketball, along with after-school soccer, after-school ball hockey and all the other variations on the after-school meme.

In an informal survey of the 10 candidates vying to succeed Gord Steeves as the new St. Vital councillor, all the contenders who identified public safety as a priority mentioned "more recreational programming" as the primary means of achieving the crime-reduction end.

Yes, recreational programming is vital to inner-city youth and plays a role in reducing crime.

But it's time for political leaders to stop trotting out recreation as a panacea and start listening to what the police and beleaguered residents of our most crime-affected neighbourhoods have been saying for years.

What they say is not all that comforting, but it does make sense: There are no easy answers to reducing violent crime, but real improvements can be made if we all work together as a community.

This is neither an excuse for inaction nor a wishy-washy sentiment, but an honest appraisal of the stark realities facing a city with a serious poverty problem, simmering racial tensions and a skyrocketing bill for maintaining and improving emergency services.

For the past four years, police and inner-city residents alike have been trying to convince politicians to endorse a more holistic approach to combating crime. In a refreshingly non-ideological counterpoint to the law-and-order rhetoric on the right and the deal-with-the-root-causes lip service on the left, they're advocating we all do everything because there is no other solution.

The police got on board a couple of years ago, when the short-lived Winnipeg Police Advisory Board issued a report that minced no words when it came to combating violent crime.

The police service said its officers are frequently asked to do the work of social workers and mental-health-care providers in areas of the city that suffer from serious social problems. Residents of these very beleaguered neighbourhoods complained they did not receive the support they needed from overtaxed police.

Mayor Sam Katz, who pushed to create the advisory board as a means of making the Winnipeg Police Service more accountable for the money it spends (right now, about a quarter of the city's annual operating budget), did not embrace the report, which advocated more co-operation with provincial health and social services agencies.

But the idea did not die. Now, police Chief Keith McCaskill is not just endorsing the concept that enforcement alone will do little to reduce violent crime, but betting his career on a holistic plan to involve police, civilian city staff, provincial social-service agencies, community groups and other ordinary people.

In a nutshell, McCaskill wants all of us to get involved. But he hasn't communicated this all that well, at least not yet.

On Friday, when the chief unveiled the police service's new violent-crime reduction strategy, he appeared to struggle to explain the overall concept.

The plan is actually laudable, as it includes both a beefed-up police presence -- for example, the police plan to devote more resources to downtown foot patrols and to monitor known offenders -- but also an effort to co-ordinate police enforcement with social-service activities.

On the latter front, the police plan to work with the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission to crack down on hotels that sell booze irresponsibly and work with the city's integrated bylaw-enforcement office to crack down on sketchy homes and apartment buildings that are known to be trouble spots.

But even more importantly, McCaskill made a public plea on Friday for everyone in the city to do something as simple as get to know their neighbours. Neighbourhoods where people know each other are less likely to tolerate both petty and serious crime, he noted.

This might seem counterintuitive to Winnipeggers, who like to believe they live in the world's largest small town, but many of us are not able to name the folks next door.

The mayor's reaction to McCaskill's plan amounted to polite praise, combined with the criticism that specific crime-reduction targets were not ambitious enough.

The real task at hand involves the city and province sitting down and co-ordinating an integrated police and social-service strategy, with buy-in from ordinary citizens and community groups. Happily, this is already taking place to some extent.

But such a complex and difficult plan will not provide politicians with any easy sound bites or do much to appease the loony left, which doesn't understand how difficult it is for the police to do their jobs, or the rabid right, which would be happy with martial law.

Again, there is no easy means of reducing violent crime. So when the police service proposes a difficult proposition, the least we can all do is take it seriously.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 20, 2011 A8