Public clings to urban myths about minorities and crime, poll shows

The latest Ipsos Reid poll showing nearly two-thirds of respondents scapegoating minorities for crime in Canada should come as no surprise.

The media in B.C., for instance, regularly spotlight Asian gang violence or Central American refugees selling rock on the Downtown Eastside.

The flood of headlines on the holiday shooting spree in Eastern Canada was in many people’s minds just the latest outrage spawned by Caribbean immigrant gangs.

If you get your information from the media and don’t have the time to do your own research, it’s easy to mistake volume and prominence for pertinence, the spectacular and the shocking for importance.

Still, the entire poll of 8,431 Canadians on public safety commissioned by Canwest News Service (considered accurate within plus or minus 1.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20), I think revealed a disconcerting disconnect between belief and reality that should give us pause.

Let’s be absolutely clear — overwhelmingly across the country the vast majority of violence and crime is perpetrated by white men.

The Hells Angels remain a far greater menace to Canadian values than any Asian or Central American group.

In fact, cops and academics were at pains when the poll hit the street to address what they saw as a perception so skewed it was an inverted mirror of reality.

Of 600 street drug traffickers in Vancouver whose national origins were checked by police, for example, 435 were North American.

Consider two other suggestions that the courts are soft on crime and especially light on young offenders. That’s a crock.

But it doesn’t surprise me that people believe these things. Radio talk-show hosts make a living peddling such shibboleths. But they are urban myths.

Our judges do a remarkably good job most of the time and any review of sentencing will fail to support the claim that crooks are getting off lighter these days.

I think the few egregious cases that become fodder for the media have an overwhelming influence on what people think.

The big-picture, information-laden stories that come out occasionally lack the immediacy and impact of a gory murder — like that of a middle-class teen gunned down while Christmas shopping by a gang of hooded, dark-skinned thugs.

Just think about the fear and concern that was left in the wake of last week’s reports that a new Hispanic gang was moving into the city. Guess how many at most might be here? Forty.

We have a police force of more than 1,100 well-equipped uniformed officers. That they are incapable of dealing with or are fearful of a couple of dozen poor slum dwellers from Central America is a joke. We have problems in our neighbourhoods. Public disorder remains a concern in particular parts of the city. However, it isn’t foreigners that have created the blight and it isn’t all bad news.

Crime has been declining for more than a decade now. We are getting better at dealing with these issues — not worse. We are becoming a more civilized society, albeit incrementally.

Maybe if we talk enough about these unfounded perceptions — whether our skin is red, white, black, brown, yellow, olive, wan or some other colour — we can dispel these misconceptions that make solving the problem difficult, but fixing the blame, oh, so easy.

I believe it’s only through dialogue that we can move on to forging policies and responses to the crime and despair in our neighbourhoods.

Somehow at the moment, the real data are getting lost in the hype and gut impressions produced by long-standing biases and social dyspepsia. Polls like this remind us of that, and of the need to constantly be checking our opinions.

It’s important to remember, too — a poll is only a sampling from the river of public opinion that is constantly changing and rolling onward.

I liked what Neil Boyd, Simon Fraser University criminology guru, had to say: “The idea that the colour of your skin has anything to do with your tendency to crime is absurd.”

Yet so many of us continue to cling to it.

imulgrew@png.canwest.com