Crime in Your City
 

I noticed we only have a thread for homicides in cities, not general crime... but I've seen over the last few days Calgary is going fucking wild. So here's a thread for general crime.


Thursday night there was a shooting in Union Square Tower - 2 injured, both survived, suspect apprehended yesterday

Saturday night (last night) some douchebag started a fire along the river in Kensington, destroying a bunch of trees

Also last night was another shooting downtown, a couple blocks east of the Friday shooting, this time at the Esso across from Keynote - 1 injured, in critical condition, suspect at large

Was the fire by a homeless person cooking or trying to stay warm?

Not just a Calgary thing.

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/loc...-crime-in-2020

Even where I am, within a week there was a face slashing and a shooting in a town with about 7000 people...

Lighting up the... side of a supermarket with an AK-47 in suburban Stockholm.

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Gatineau is still relatively quiet, in keeping with recent years' trends.

Ottawa bad been trending rougher in more recent years but has calmed down a bit since COVID. Still not the placid Ottawa of yore but that is probably long gone anyway.

Montréal and Toronto seems to be chugging along with their trends of recent years, with an uptick in street violence and shootings in Toronto and slightly more domestic violence in Montréal since the pandemic.

Crime in Moncton is pretty much entirely related to drug use and the natural associations with homelessness, vagrancy, prostitution, petty theft and robbery.

The actual rate of crime may not be worse than before, but homelessness, vagrancy and panhandling is much more obvious in the downtown core than it used to be, and this has an effect on the popular perception of an otherwise gentrifying portion of the city. Whether or not people are actually unsafe in the core, seeing so many disheveled men wandering the streets and asking for spare change certainly has an effect on the perception of the safety of the downtown. Between this perception, and the COVID pandemic, downtown businesses are certainly suffering.

Downtowns are fucked. You allow this shit to happen legally there's no stopping it. Covid has forced me to give up on Urbanism, but it was already dying in my heart 24 months ago.

People can't have it both ways, yes these people aren't choosing to be this way, but that also means these people don't have self control.

Until people wise up and realize rational reasoned measures need to be taken before these people bring everyone else and themselves into the gutter, we're in trouble.

I"ve been around the drug game in London(through work) and it is just odd how people can't see the decline from functioning drug addict to cardboard boxes. If you allow the gateway to exist so visibly people will take it.

If you have a weak will social coercion is one of the things keeping you afloat.

My street was in the news for a crackhouse that got shot up. Article noted police had been there well over 100 times already this year.

A convicted sex offender knocked on a suburban home and sexually assaulted the underage girl who answered. That was insane.

Thankfully it does not happen often but imo the parole and release system does not do enough to protect us from dangerous offenders.

There is not much outrage when it happens, with some exceptions like Quebec City last year.

But otherwise, I guess we get what we deserve.

Passive society.

Crime hasn't changed a whole lot in Winnipeg lately, it's mostly the same as it ever was. However, one trend that has really stood out in the last couple of years has been brazen thefts from stores... liquor stores in particular were getting hit by roving groups of people who would storm in with gym bags or whatever, load them up, and run out. The Liquor Marts have beefed up their security big-time and you now have to present ID before the doors get unlocked.

I've had chats with people who work retail and they say the same thing has happened at many shops in malls, etc., but you don't hear a lot about it because the retailers don't want to bring attention to it.

It's a somewhat disturbing trend to think that people are basically stealing with impunity... as the thieves become emboldened, you know it won't end with grabbing a bunch of shoes off the shelf at the Nike Outlet or whatever.

We protest everything here. There's rarely a week without at least one moderately-sized protest. Most aren't even reported.

The sex crimes one, though, has been brewing for a while:

https://i.postimg.cc/wvMbmhrg/Confed...ault-Rally.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/85YXB78W/Sexual...n-Building.jpg

That one was last week, prompted by a mistrial in the second trial of a Royal Newfoundland Constabulary officer who gave a drunk missus a ride home and raped her. Poor woman is now facing a third trial over years.

That might be true for visible crimes committed by people who look the part, but don't forget about white collar crime.

"Justice" only applies to the poor. Rich people never face justice, unless they commit a major crime against other rich people. Even then, their punishments are negligible at best, relative to what anyone who wasn't raised with disgusting generational wealth would experience.

Especially in the context of who ends up in the prison system long term and for what. Murderers and rapists whom we think of being a vast majority or prisoners is in fact a very tiny amount. Most people are in for bullshit drug possession charges (not even trafficking or distribution) if I'm not mistaken!

https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/r.../index-en.aspx

Then this is another area where you guys are unique. In most of the rest of the country, mandatory sentencing with no "breaks" or "second chances" is considered a right-wing, knee-jerk borderline Trump American talking point - even for people convicted of pretty horrible crimes.You don't want to talk about that in polite company, lest you be called a bunch of not-so-nice names.

^ I think a lot of that has to do with a combination of St. John's being a small-ish city and the local news having more than ample time to report on crime that would otherwise go unnoticed in larger cities (gotta find a way to give 60 minutes of news every night). People become familiar with repeat offenders, as well as high-profile offenders. Eventually you realize they'll never be rehabilitated and are a waste of time and a danger to others around them. People get sick of it.

The local police are a bit too relaxed too. Maybe it has to do with overcrowding in the jails, but people are never held for as long as they theoretically should be.

Case in point, the individual who SHH mentioned shot up a drug house on his street was involved in another shooting that same morning. Police arrested him after a high speed chase....and then what? He was apparently released from custody and was arrested less than a week later for another firearms offense. Why were they released? How did they get access to more guns?

The individual who sexually assaulted that teenager also has a very checkered past. He stabbed a man many years ago (was found not guilty on account of self defense) and just did a lengthy sentence for sexual assault. No warning upon release, nothing like that....and then bam, a re-offense. Of course the severity of the offense triggered outrage, which of course prompted the police to issue a warning against threats of vigilante justice. Plenty of Twitter accounts were suspended that day for people rightfully exclaiming what should be done with that individual.

I'm all for rehabilitation, but there comes a point where hugging thugs doesn't work. Repeat offenders of violent crime should rot in jail. A lot of people fall for the misty-eyed courtroom bullshit that criminals pull, with their lawyers telling them to say things about how they want to go back to school or get clean and all that. As soon as their time is done the first thing they do is call the same group of people they were with before.

CERB ended, and it's replacement is less easy to obtain, so we're feeling the affects. Probably a third of the CERB recipients in my neighbourhood were drug users tunnelling the money to dealers. Overdose deaths are up significantly due to the flood of drugs, and now as debts rack up in the coming months in sure a spike in homicides will follow.

Just going off personal opinion/experience, and what I understand about psychopathy. Good people want to believe most prisoners are better than they actually are.

The people I know that ended up in prison deserved it, likely deserve more time than they got, even if I personally like them.

I mean this is one of those odd conversations.

I mean there's good reason people want to emotionally shelter themselves from the unfortunate reality.

Most people have had bad moments in their lives where they've done things they shouldn't have.

But a significant minority have done a number of unforgivable things.

I honestly think our society has a real problem acknowledging the dark under belly of our society.

I'm not just talking about people beating the living hell out of eachother because they wanted an 8th ball of coke.

I'm talking about the middle school teacher that gets caught with kiddie porn, I'm talking about people who turn a blind eye to any number of things.

Shit is dark, and yet at the exact same it is bright.

I think our society is truly having trouble with the good and evil paradigm.

For whatever reason we want to abstract away the concept of evil.

Our society has more or less established itself on the concept that it is an irrational or even bigoted viewpoint.

Or when we do accept variants of the concept we try to externalize it to this outside force. I.e. the Devil, atheism, capitalism, racism, etc.

It doesn't hurt that we've become a society where people aren't forced to take on an idea like original sin. Where basically you accept there's evil in side of you, refusing to do so is one of the biggest acts of evil.

Unironically you can see this idea of subconscious racism as being a variant of that.

Unironically you see these anti racism cults being very similar to religious cults, obsessed with purification and guilt.

Rational intelligent people continually believe narratives that racism/sexism makes up a far larger proportion of the evil quota than it actually does.

We are also seeing a huge increase in overdoses here. We keep hearing ambulance sirens quite often now and many of the calls are for overdoses. And this is not just downtown but in many parts of the city.

Timmins is the most dangerous place to live in Ontario and 10th most dangerous place in Canada according to rankings done by Maclean's magazine.

Link: https://www.macleans.ca/canadas-most...s-places-2020/