Just recently in the Toronto Star newspaper, I remember reading that in the past 15 years or so in Canada, while the crime rate has steadily dropped, the reporting of crime has increased somewhere on the order of 600%. An astounding figure.
Something else I had read (I can't remember where) was one reason for the rising crime rates during the 60s, 70s, and 80s in Canada (and I'm sure this could apply to the US as well). In the past, when a crime happenned, it wasn't collected into a national databank.
In the late 50s, it was decided to start keeping track of crime statistics. As you can imagine, these procedures were implemented with the large urban police stations first. Most Police Chiefs in small towns, didn't bother calling in their crime statistics. But, little by little, the new procedures were implementted and more and more police stations started callling in/mailing in their crime statistics.
Then arrived the computer, and as more and more towns and cities were wired, more and more crimes were reported, thus giving the impression that the crime rate was actually going up. In fact, all that was happenning was that the crime information statistics were being better reported and recorded in a yearly databank.
Once every police department in Canada was wired (which happenned sometime in the mid 80s) and no more new police stations came on-line...all of a sudden, crime rates started falling. Amazing!
Peter Stride
Toronto, Canada
