What's up with Chicago?

Allan:

Why does Toronto, with a population of 2,826,498, require only (approximately) 5,500 police officers, but Chicago, population 2,720,546, requires over 15,000 police officers?

Mr. Smith seems to suffer from putting the cart before the horse.

If lots of police officers stopped crime, then Chicago should be crime free, shouldn’t it?

This discrepancy is largely a difference between how Canadians view public safety and how Americans view public safety.

Americans see public safety as something they have to take care of personally. So, if you’re an American, you tend to own a firearm and see this as something that makes you safer. You certainly can’t trust the police, and you especially can’t trust the courts. Conversely, the police see the population as something to be “controlled” because they’ve all got guns (don’t you see) and the courts see criminal justice as something punitive. This all provides an unfortunate feedback loop where the public doesn’t trust the police because they pick on perfectly innocent people trying to defend themselves, the court gives the police a pass, and the police then have to be more worried about the population.

Here in Canada, public safety is considered a collective endeavour. When something bad happens, you call the police and let them take care of it. The police trust people. The courts trust the police and the people. When police totally screw up, they go to jail like everyone else. When a defendant is freed, the courts explain why that had to happen. This engenders a lot of trust. If you do commit a crime here in Toronto, we trust the police will get on top of it. The more serious the crime, the more people work on it. A guy who gets murdered in Chicago gets two detectives assigned. A guy who gets murdered in Toronto gets an entire squad of officers assigned. That’s right - despite having more officers, the police in Chicago assign fewer resources to each crime.

The reason we need fewer officers in Toronto is that people trust the police for the most part. There are exceptions, but we see those exceptions as the fault of the police rather than the fault of the citizens.

Canadian policing needs minor reforms. We still shoot mentally ill people for no reason and pick on native Canadians. American policing needs major reforms, not more money. In Canada, the police are part of society. In the United States, police are separate from society and are there to control them. The British knew from the beginning of policing that police can’t keep order without public cooperation. Americans seem to have forgotten that.

Steve Haddok