Montreal City Weblog

Kate 11:07 on 2024-06-04 Permalink Reply  

• jeather 12:13 on 2024-06-04 Permalink

  There is something to “is Montreal less safe than in the past/comparable cities” but also to “are people responding to fake vibes”? (I definitely feel no less safe in public transit than I ever did, and my car is 12 years old and this would be a ransom of red chief situation.)

• Ian 14:48 on 2024-06-04 Permalink

  Montreal used to be way more sketchy, violent, and many ways, fun. It’s certainly safer now than it was on the 80s and 90s.

• Kate 15:03 on 2024-06-04 Permalink

  Apropos, I’ve found someone posting the archives of Allô Police to Substack, but you have to pay to get more than marginal access.

• Joey 15:29 on 2024-06-04 Permalink

  The finding he zeroes in on – that compared to 10 years ago, a significantly greater number of young people are comfortable with violence as a response to whatever – is worth mulling over.

• Kate 15:36 on 2024-06-04 Permalink

  I thought so too.

• Ian 20:44 on 2024-06-04 Permalink

  Oh wow I remember seeing Allô Police when I first hitchhiked to Montreal in ’87 and I was like “this is where I need to be, what a crazy, wonderful town”

• Tim S. 21:35 on 2024-06-04 Permalink

  A couple of thoughts around the original article:

  1) I can’t remember where, it may have even been here, but it’s been pointed out that murder rates are as much a function of ER care as of policing/crime rates. So the fact the attempted murder rates are up while actual murder rates are down is a little worrisome.

  2) On the point that young people are increasing accepting of the idea of violence: I wonder if, as actual violence goes down (without disputing Lagacé’s general point, but looking at my kids’ experience there seems to be less casual schoolyard violence than I remember), the perception of the dangers of violence decreases as well.

• Blork 22:23 on 2024-06-04 Permalink

  Tim S. you might have gotten that murder rate thing from a Malcolm Gladwell podcast. (That’s where I heard it; was quite interesting. It includes expert opinions that if RFK were shot in the same way today, at the same place, he almost certainly would survive.)

  And yeah, murder is not the only crime. Basing sweeping opinions about crime just on just “murder” is silly and inaccurate.

• Joey 09:50 on 2024-06-05 Permalink

  The argument for using the murder rate as a proxy for the crime rate is that, unlike for pretty much all other crimes, it’s hard for the police to undercount (or otherwise ‘manage’) the number of murders. As we’ve discussed here in the past, very little present-day police work is what we naively consider ‘crime-fighting’ – ask anyone who’s been robbed recently whether the police will even both to send an officer to fill out a report. Forget, you know, investigations. Anyway, while a department can tinker with definitions and massage the numbers to make it look like certain kinds of crime are decreasing (or, if politically expedient, increasing), murders are generally murders.

• Kate 10:23 on 2024-06-05 Permalink

  Joey, Ted Rutland was quoted by the CBC on that topic:

  Ted Rutland, an associate professor at Concordia University’s department of geography, planning and environment with a particular focus on urban security and policing, says the police force isn’t built to stop those killings from happening.

  “We’re talking about domestic disputes. We’re talking about fights between people who know each other or don’t know each other that get out of control,” said Rutland. “There’s no amount of policing that can prevent these things.”

  Instead, he says underlying issues such as stress, mental illness and other deeper social problems must be addressed.

  My impression is that the police force mostly works against organized crime, so they have little interest in petty crooks (even if the “petty” crook messes up your life by stealing your laptop or burgling your house).

• jeather 15:31 on 2024-06-05 Permalink

  I do not know the statistics in Canada, but assuming they’re not too dissimilar from the US, the police could do a lot to prevent domestic disputes by not being the ones assaulting their partners.

• Blork 15:34 on 2024-06-05 Permalink

  Following up a bit on the Gladwell reference I made above: Malcolm Gladwell did a series on gun crime in the US last year as part of his “Revisionist History” podcast. One of the segments was on the topic of how NRA types use the declining murder rate, and overall “death by gun” rate, as an example of why the US doesn’t need stricter gun controls. But he presents data that shows the actual SHOOTING rates are way up, but people die from gunshot wounds a lot less than they used to.

  He talks to some experts who attribute this to much better medical treatment of gunshot wounds (hey, they’ve had a lot of practice and ample opportunity for research) as well as improved policies and practices for first responder. Also, and very importantly, there has been a strong emphasis on creating “centers of excellence” (or something like that) for emergency trauma treatment in urban areas.

  The result is that while far more people are being shot in the US than previously, far more are surviving. They dig into the RFK assassination as an example. In 1968 they had no such centers of excellence for treatment of traumatic injuries, just good old fashioned ERs. As a result, RFK didn’t go into surgery for his bullet wound (to the head) for several hours, if I recall. Whereas if the exact same thing happened today, there is a trauma center about 10 minutes from that hotel, and they estimate he’d be in surgery less than 30 minutes after the shooting. Plus medical treatments for brain trauma have improved vastly, so in all likelihood he would survive that wound today.

  The whole series is worth listening to. (Six parts I think?) Here is the one I’m referring to: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/guns-part-4-moral-hazard

• jeather 15:52 on 2024-06-05 Permalink

  Just for fun, the If Books Could Kill podcast episodes about Steven Pinker (one, two), where they take down a fair bit of his work on why violence is declining. (I have no memory of whether they discussed the better medical care details.)