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I've had to deal with 2 break-ins in the past month, there were 2 additional attempts but I wasn't required for those (other volunteers took over). The first one was at work, some power tools were broken. The footage on camera was fun, she just about shit herself when the alarm went off. The second was at our youth centre, someone broke in at 6am on a Sunday to steal a bowl full of granola bars and apples (which we hand out for free during operating hours). They've been back 3 times, we no longer have a screen on the back door and the gate we built is less of a deterrent than originally thought.

My opinion on all of this is unchanged. And I don't fault the cop (I'm assuming a fairly novice one) for promising us he'd get the tools back "within hours", though he never did. Thunder Bay has among the highest if not the highest amount of police per-capita in this country and crime only seems to be going up (the actual stats show modest increases). We can throw thousands of cops at this problem if we want, but the court system doesn't function anymore (and our only courthouse—everything in one building to save money!!—caught fire 10 days ago and is now indefinitely shut down) so it can't handle all the criminals, trails are happening 2 to 5 years after the crimes have been committed, and the addicts that are instigating the bulk of the crime (especially the petty crime but also much of the domestic crime) have unaddressed health issues that, honestly, it's not fair to police that we force them to deal with it.

After that, our solution to so many aspects of the crime problem is just throwing people into jail. But the jails are all overcrowding and understaffed. I know too many people who quit being correctional officers because they tired of having feces and urine hurled at them while they try to work in facilities that are housing 3 to 6 people in 45sqft cells. This isn't fucking working. Anyone who thinks this is working is delusional. Arrest one gangster, two more pop up to replace them. When one junkie dies in the streets, two more people start using hard drugs. The situation is just spiraling out of control. And in the US where they've put policing and prisons into high gear, it's even worse. Largest prisoner population on earth (1% of them are in prison at any one time!!), crime statistics that make the worst of Canada look like a suburban neighbourhood and longer sentences but people there seem to feel less safe than we do.

I can't say that a country that responds to this kind of societal breakdown with "let's hire more cops and give more cops more money to fight crime!" is pro-cop at all. They're not the right people to respond to this crisis. Their skill sets don't match up with a lot of the demands we're placing on them, and the complete lack of reinforcement from any other aspects of society shows what we really think of police in Canada. Not to mention the chronic under-funding of northern police to the point that they're operating our of mould infested shacks and having to shit into buckets because there's not plumbing. Fuck the police? Canada already does.