Those pesky facts

Edward Greenspan and Anthony Doob take the Cons and their apologists to task for ignoring and/or misrepresenting the reality of decreasing crime levels in Canada:

Everyone wants to reduce crime and use resources effectively. But the Conservative government’s “tough on crime” agenda would have you believe that crime is increasing and can only be reduced by using tougher penalties. This assertion is wrong, as is a study by an Ottawa-based think tank that reviewed the 2009 Statistics Canada report on crime.

The study, by former Alberta Crown attorney Scott Newark for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, suggests that violent crime is increasing, contrary to the Statscan report and all reasoned examinations of existing data. Mr. Newark’s study is filled with problems: It compares figures that can’t be compared. It presents figures that are inaccurate. And it ignores evidence supporting the conclusion that crime is, in fact, decreasing.
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It’s easy to make crime look as though it’s going up if one provides numbers that are wrong or misleading. Mr. Newark offers what he calls “youth violent crime” for three years and shows “rates per 100,000” for these years: 956 (for 2001), 1,498 (for 2004) and 1,887 (for 2008). He then concludes there’s been a 100-per-cent increase in youth violent crime.

The data from the Statscan report he’s critiquing are in Column 3. Mr. Newark’s starting point (2001) is clearly wrong; he says in his table that the number is 956 (rather than 1,957, the true number), thereby supporting his erroneous conclusion that there’s been a large increase in youth violent crime. Had he reproduced the correct figures for these years in his table, one couldn’t conclude that the youth violent crime rate had gone up.
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It appears that for people such as Mr. Newark, Statistics Canada is never wrong as long as it reports that crime rates are increasing. If it says crime is decreasing, then it’s never right. The fact of the matter is that crime rates have nothing to do with tougher laws or harsher sentencing. The fact is that crime rates go up and down. In recent years, they’ve gone down.