The Black Rod

Six months in, and the biggest good news story of the year is going unreported. What would you say if we told you that crime in Winnipeg had dropped 26 percent in one year? Well, don't get excited, because we can't make that statement. But we can say that there's been a 26 percent drop in the ten crimes surveyed by the police department's Crimestat service. That's a huge improvement and its not driven solely by a phony drop in car thefts. (Phony because there was no legitimate reason for the sky-high level of car theft in Winnipeg in the first place. To credit anyone with reducing car theft is like congratulating the local arsonist for setting fewer fires this year. If the provincial NDP, judges and probation officials had done their job, there would have been no car theft epidemic.) The single dark cloud over the good news is in Crimestat is the likelihood we may recapture the unwanted title of Murder Capital of Canada again. Winnipeg's 16 homicide...

Oh, the irony. Here's the NDP releasing a string of pre-election, tough-on-crime announcements and they get smacked in the kisser with a scandal that exposes their biggest crime-fighting "success" as a complete farce. It would be funny if it wasn't for the string of tragic deaths that leads back directly to the office of the Justice Minister. It turns out that Manitoba's probation services believes it's not bound by the sentences laid down by judges. Where a judge imposed strict probation conditions on a repeat juvenile car thief, the lad's probation officer waived them away and replaced them with her own, superior, "judgement", resulting in the death of a city cab driver rammed by the same joyriding car thief who was breaking his court-ordered probation. The electorate has learned through evidence presented at a sentencing hearing that the epidemic of car theft infecting Winnipeg was fed for years by this very lax sup...

We don't know who's more insulting, politician Andrew Swan or reporters Mike McIntyre and Gabrielle Giroday. But its clear that this trio is guilty of grossly misleading the public. The team of McIntrye and Giroday should have been collecting accolades for their revelation that the teenager charged with killing a motorist by smashing into him with a stolen Hummer was a car thief previously convicted of involvement in another car crash where a taxi driver was killed. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/accused-thief-has-a-dark-past-79392032.html Instead, by simply regurgitating the political lies of Justice Minister Andrew Swan, they negated their good work and deserve to share the disgrace. Their Wednesday story concluded with the obligatory search for a solution: "Attorney General Andrew Swan said provincial governments have been pushing Ottawa for changes to the Youth Criminal Justice Act that would allow judges to take deterrence into account when sentencing young o...

Who's stealing all those cars? That, in 2002, was the burning question facing Winnipeg police---and Manitoba Public Insurance which was paying the cost. Or, as the authors of the submission from the Winnipeg Auto Theft Suppression Strategy put it in their submission to the Herman Goldstein Award for Excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing “Why was auto theft so attractive to young people that some would go out in -30 C weather to spend the day stealing 5 cars?” MPI forked out some money to get the answer. They had to. The problem was costing them millions. And it was getting worse by the year. Starting the very next year, 2003, to 2007, Winnipeg had the worst car theft problem in North America. In 2007, the theft rate here was 1714 per 100,000 of population. The city with the highest rate in the United States was Modesto, California, at 1048/100,000 . The cost to MPI would eventually climb to nearly $40 million a year. In 2002 MPI funded a study of jailed car thieves to get their...