Confidence drops in RCMP’s youth crime prevention tactics

The RCMP is reviewing its policies after a federal government survey revealed confidence in the force’s ability to prevent youth crime fell by 25 per cent in 2010.

Only 46 per cent of the force’s police partners responded favourably when asked if “the RCMP is preventing and reducing youth involvement in crime as victims and offenders,” down from a 62 per cent favourable response rate in 2009 and 2008.

Even though RCMP officials say they are looking into the results, the reasons for the decline among these groups – which include other police forces and community organizations – remain unclear to those involved with the problem.

Policing partners are unsure about what the RCMP is doing on the ground to prevent youth crime and cope with the effects.

“It kind of took us by a shock because we have a lot of successes in our program,” says Samuel Breau, a youth policy analyst with the RCMP based in Ottawa. “It didn’t go by unnoticed for sure.”

The RCMP, as Canada’s national police force, is responsible for youth crime prevention strategies across the country. This includes areas where they are not the front-line policing agency, including Ontario and Quebec and cities that employ their own police forces.

Part of the problem is that police forces across the country appear unclear on what exactly the RCMP is doing to prevent youth crime.

“In terms of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, I don’t know,” says Chief Gary Crowell, the head of the Canadian Association of the Chiefs of Police crime prevention committee and the police chief for Halton, Ontario.

He declined to comment on the results of the survey.

'A colossal drop'

The survey results set off an internal debate within the RCMP about whether it needs to change its policies aimed at youth crime prevention, Breau says. It’s one of the force’s priorities since people who get involved in crime at an early age are more likely to reoffend when they’re older.

“There’s something obviously that’s gone adrift in their relationships with their policing partners,” says Robert Gordon, the head of the school of criminology at Simon Fraser University.

“That is a colossal drop.”

"I’m a big believer in investing money in crime prevention. What the Conservatives have been focusing on is what happens with crime after it has occurred. I think this is a failure of leadership."

The internal review comes as the Conservative government continues to spend less than expected on crime prevention while dedicating millions of dollars to punish people after they have committed crimes.

It allocated $64 million to its national crime prevention strategy for the 2009-10 fiscal year, but only spent $41 million – or about two-thirds of that. It has spent or is promising to spend more than $600 million in building new prisons.

“I’m a big believer in investing money in crime prevention. What the Conservatives have been focusing on is what happens with crime after it has occurred,” says Don Davies, the NDP’s public safety critic in the House of Commons.

“I think this is a failure of leadership.”

Less money for gang prevention

Another program aimed at keeping youth away from crime will also lose its funding this year.

The Youth Gang Prevention Fund, with a budget of $7.5 million a year for the past four years, provides money for organizations to start programs that keep young people away from crime. The government has given no indication the funding will be renewed when it expires at the end of March.

These are the sorts of programs the RCMP needs to be promoting to tackle the issue, says Irvin Waller, a professor with the Institute for Crime Prevention at the University of Ottawa.

The National Youth Officer Program and the Youth Outreach Program are two platforms the RCMP uses to engage youth at a community level.

"They need to be partnering with these agencies to look at how they can play their law enforcement role against gangs while the youth-serving agencies can help the youth get out of gangs,” he says.

He believes the RCMP actually has a very small role in directly reducing crime on the front lines, making this coordination effort all the more important.

The police’s role in preventing youth crime is largely one of education, says the CACP’s Chief Crowell. This includes coordinating community groups’ efforts and sending officers into schools to reach youth directly.

Youth crime higher than ten years ago

Youth crime continues to be a problem in Canada.

The total number of crimes committed by youth aged 12 to 17 is lower than previous years, according to data from Statistics Canada. However,the rate of 6,490 crimes per 100,000 youths in 2009 is still higher than it was a decade ago, as is the number of violent crimes committed by youth.

The survey, conducted for the federal government by Decima Research, was completed in July 2010 after 5,875 interviews. It is considered accurate to within 1.3 percentage points.

Youth Crime