CBC News used knowledge of the police crime map to compare calls for service for seven other police incidents from January to July 2024 with statistics from the same time in the year prior to the opening of the two sites.
The incidents included assaults, robberies and damage to property.
At the Kitchener center, the study found that the number of calls to police — about five of those seven types of incidents — decreased compared to the same time before CTS sites opened, and those declines were even greater than those seen in the survey. . city as a whole.
Downtown Guelph outnumbered the city in total in calls for service for two of the incidents: attacks and riots.
“The claim that these sites exacerbate crime is false,” said Thomas Kerr, a professor of social medicine at the University of Colombia who has studied the relationship between supervised intake sites and crime.
“It’s fiction and it’s a political game. “
Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced Tuesday that the province has the last sites operating within two hundred meters of schools and daycares, meaning 10 of Ontario’s 17 sites, plus those in Kitchener and Guelph, They will have to close until March 31 of next year. .
Crime in the neighborhoods where the CTS sites are located is higher than in the surrounding neighborhoods, the government said in pronouncing the closures.
“In Tokyo, reports of attacks in 2023 are 113% higher and robberies are 97% higher in the neighborhoods near those places than in the rest of the city,” he said.
“Near the Hamilton site, violent crime reports were 195 percent higher than in the rest of the city, and the crime rate near the Ottawa site was 250 percent higher than in the rest of the city. “
But Kerr asked, “How do we know this has anything to do with how supervised intake works?”
The only way to assess, as it should be, a site’s effect on crime, he said, is to “look at how the rate of disorder and crime adjusts between before and after a supervised injection site, and then use other neighborhoods as controls. ”
CBC investigated the number of service calls similar to seven other incident types for the era between Jan. 1 and July 31, 2024. He compared them to the number of service calls from the same era in 2019, before the CTS site opened. in Kitchener.
He also compared the evolution of the number of calls in the Central area, where it is located, with the evolution at the municipal level.
This is what we found:
The CBC’s findings mirror those of the Region of Waterloo Public Health and Paramedic Services in its 2023 assessment of the Kitchener site.
“Crime statistics provided through [the Waterloo Regional Police Service] demonstrate that the presence of the CTS has not been linked to an increase in crime in the region, despite public belief on this issue,” he wrote the service in your report. .
CBC conducted the same investigation for Guelph CTS site awareness from January 1 to July 31, 2024 and the same time in 2017 and discovered the following:
Jones framed the closure of CTS sites as an effort for public safety, especially that of school-aged children.
But an associate professor at the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy said the sites are in spaces where the need exists because pharmacological activity is already occurring.
“On the contrary, for me, it will make the network safer because those Americans will get drunk,” Wasem Alsabbagh said.
“Then think of a school, for example. If you have a safer position to pull the [needles], is that greater for that school?Or if I don’t have a position to throw them away safely. . . and what?” are thrown into the streets, which is safer for schools?
Alsebbagh, who worked at Community Healthcaring KW before CTS opened, said she hasn’t seen many replacements at the Kitchener center, for better or worse, since opening.
This sentiment is shared by the owner of a business located about 350 meters from the site.
“I wouldn’t say [crime] has gone up or down since before it existed,” said Osman Sokolovic, owner of King Framing.
“I mean, everything we have here is pretty closed and safe. . . If you leave something outside overnight or leave the garage open, it’ll all be in the morning. “
But this is nothing new for Sokolovic.
“It’s a matter of the center,” he said.
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