Crime down in Halifax

BOPC goes deep on homelessness policy

By Matt Stickland

After a long summer hiatus, Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners met last week for a beefy meeting. The headline news, tucked away in the last agenda item, is that with a few notable exceptions, crime is down and public safety is on the rise in the HRM.

Halifax’s two police departments shared crime stats from the first half of this year compared to the crime stats for the first half of last year, and except for shoplifting, sexual assault, and illegal and legal murder, crime is way down this year, even if the stats themselves are kind of useless.

For example, even though the HRM had a 27% increase in homicides last year, the parts of the HRM policed by the RCMP had a 100% reduction in the murder rate since everyone who has been killed in the first half of this year was killed downtown.

The stats reflect headlines we’ve been seeing for the first half of the year. A trade war, droughts throughout the world’s food-producing regions, the USA cracking down on farm labourers, corporate consolidation in Canada’s grocery sector and decades of wage stagnation have led to “a significant increase in shoplifting.” According to the police’s report to the board, in Dartmouth, “the increase in shoplifting has been primarily dominated by thefts from grocery and liquor stores.”