By the Numbers: Rising or falling…that is the question

In a recent report, Why Canadian Crime Statistics Don’t Add Up: Not the Whole Truth, written for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, author Scott Newark argues that violent crime has actually increased in Canada despite Statistics Canada reporting a decrease in violent crimes for the past decade. We could have predicted the controversy this would cause. Professor Anthony Doob and lawyer Edward Greenspan, among others, are taking Newark to task on the research methodology used for this report.

Doob and Greenspan contend that Newark’s report is flawed by his use of data that cannot be compared statistically. To get even more technical, they also suggest that Newark uses numbers from older reports with different definitions of “violence” and that he looks at overall numbers of violent crime without accounting for increases in population. Doob and Greenspan are unequivocal that these are statistical errors that end up showing an increase when in reality there was a decrease.

Anna Maria Tremonti recently interviewed Scott Newark on The Current. Audio of the interview can be found online. It is well worth a listen as Tremonti digs into the challenges of presenting and interpreting complex data like crime statistics.

While the debate about the data continues, the fact remains that Canada’s public safety and crime policies will be influenced by one set of data or another.

And that’s why numbers matter.