The Black Rod

There's a new challenger in town for the title of Fake News Champion. Stand aside Dan Lett, columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and current holder of the belt. Your new competition is your colleague, Ryan Thorpe, who's been described by his alma mater as an  "investigative reporter who covers crime for the daily newspaper." This past Saturday Thorpe was responsible for a three-page spread headlined "SAFETY FIRST, everything else last." The thrust of the article is that the budget for policing (and the fire department and paramedics, but mainly the police) takes such a big bite (nearly half) out of the budget there's hardly anything left for other services. This Saturday he had a follow-up story arguing that Winnipeg spends too much money on police salaries when only 34 percent of reported crimes are cleared. To bolster his argument, Thorpe's both stories cited the work of Kevin Walby, "a criminologist and associate professor at the University ...

It's been two-and-a-half weeks since an aboriginal mob overturned two landmark statues on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature and Winnipeg police haven't made a single arrest. This is suspicious since the vandalism happened right under the eyes of dozens of uniformed police, none of whom who lifted a finger to stop it. In fact, the next day, Police Chief Danny Smyth commended the police at the scene for doing nothing. Even after officers were spit on and had rocks thrown at them, the police failed to respond, effectively sending a message that they were ceding the streets to violent rabble. Smyth, reading emotionlessly from a written statement, reassured the public that the police "will be investigating this."  Yay. He said they would start by watching footage from security cameras at the Legislature.  He forgot to mention the cameras are a good 200 or 300 feet away from the site of the vandalism and assaults on individual officers. The blatant inaction by...

When did the magic die? A week ago the Winnipeg police department delivered the bad news---crime in the city is out of control. The picture painted by the numbers (for 2018) was appalling. Robberies up ten percent in  a single year.  (And that was the good news.) Property crimes were up almost 20 percent.  Total crime was 33 percent higher than the five year average. The measure of violent crime in Winnipeg had soared to a rating of 161.  Only four years earlier it stood at 116. That's a 38 percent deterioration in safety. How did it happen? How, when in 2015 the police and Winnipeg's police board announced they had discovered the magic solution to crime? "Smart Policing" they called it.    A team of crime analysts would pore through data to spot crime hot-spots and as soon as they identified a trend (car thefts, muggings, liquor store robberies) they could call in police resources to descend on the problem a...