Lorne Gunter: Citizens don't make distinction between crime and social disorder

You can’t reduce crime simply by redefining what is and isn’t a crime. Many actions that were once crimes are now chalked by city bureaucrats up to “social disorder” and no longer show up in crime stats.

In other cases, crimes are so common and police response to them is so indifferent — like theft of bikes and tools and law furniture from private yards — that many victims no longer bother to report them.

An unreported crime is an uncounted crime and, therefore, doesn’t show up in official crime figures. If enough crimes go unreported, the crime rate goes down. On paper.

Consider what deputy city manager Jennifer Flamen told city council before Christmas.

“Edmonton’s violent crime rate is now lower than both the national and provincial averages,” Flamen claimed, a fact she credited to more proactive policing. Edmonton Police Service members go out looking for potentially dangerous situations and deescalate them before they morph into full-blown crimes.

“Our targeted initiatives like the guns and gang strategy and the city and Edmonton Police Service’s deployment partnerships on transit are working,” according to Flamen. That’s good. Crime rates going down are always preferable to rates going up.

How, though, to reconcile administration’s boast of a significant drop in crime with EPS stats that show violent crime is up significantly since before the pandemic?

The police agree that violent crime went down 10 per cent in 2024, although their figures show the crime severity index was only down five per cent. While there may be fewer violent crimes overall, the percentage that are severe has not fallen nearly as quickly..

To some extent, Flamen’s numbers are good news. For instance, police reported a reduction of violent assaults on LRT and transit of six per cent from 2023.

But if you go just a little further back, the progress on crime disappears. According to the EPS, firearms crimes are up one-third since the year before the pandemic. Knife attacks are up 15 per cent and the use of bear spray as a weapon is up nearly 60 per cent.

Overall, violent crime is up 16 per cent since 2019, making the city’s boast about crime rates coming down last year a little less comforting.

On top of all of that, by early May of 2025, EPS had already administered the same number of naloxone doses as in all 2024, which very likely means opioid overdoses are way up, too.

In addition to these conflicting figures, which take some bloom off the city’s rosy crime picture, you can see the unreality in the administration’s statistics in just one statement by Flamen. “We’re careful not to criminalize poverty but to state clearly the presence of struggling individuals, be it overdoses, encampments, or open drug use” are not criminal acts.

But for most Edmontonians, these seem like crimes. The city defines them as “social disorder,” not crimes. However, it seems like criminal behaviour to ordinary residents. And that contributes to the public’s believing crime is still a problem.

The distinction between crime and social disorder may make a difference to sociologists, urban planners, lefty city councillors and deputy city managers. But to ordinary Edmontonians, witnessing drunkenness and drug injections on transit or being accosted by aggressive panhandlers or driving past encampments every day, this a distinction without a difference.

It all looks criminal to them.

There is also the possibility that widespread social disorder in our city encourages more crime. Criminals make no distinction between crime and social disorder, either, so they take their cues to commit more crimes because of the city’s tolerance of social disorder.

Crime going down is better than it going up, but officialdom shouldn’t pat itself on the back too hard.

Edmontonian’s understand what they feel and hear, not what they are told by experts when those expert claims runs contrary to ordinary citizen’s perceptions of reality.

lgunter@postmedia.com

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