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Chilliwack
THURSDAY, JULY 31, 2014
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chilliwacktimes.com
2014 Walmart
8249 Eagle Landing Parkway
Superstore 45779 Luckakuck Way
Save On Foods 6014 Vedder Road
/chilliwacktimes
Motor vehicle theft
B&E rate
2004
1662.87
@chilliwacktimes
Theft under $5,000
2004
2004
2013
1,419.49
2013
5,469.74
2013
846.89
2,868.75
550.77
61%
49%
48%
Attempted murder charges dropped Shooting victim frustrated and fearful for his life BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
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Crime takes a nosedive
Local statistics mirror provincewide trend of decreasing rates
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haun Stephan could be a textbook criminology case study in the root causes of prolific offending. Stephan is poor. He has neurological problems. He has substance abuse problems. He has a Grade 10 education, but by his own admission he even cheated his way through school to get that. At 35 years old, he has never once held a job of any kind. This is the definition of a career criminal, a prolific offender. And it’s people like Stephan that skew all crime statistics across Canada and the entire western world. It is at least in part because of people like Stephan that the public
PAUL J. HENDERSON @peejayaitch has a skewed perception of just how bad crime is in Chilliwack and elsewhere. Crime is going down in Canada, British Columbia and, yes, stop the presses, even here in Chilliwack. Over the last 10 years the crime rate (total criminal code violation rate per 100,000 population) dropped from 16,525 to 10,179, a decrease of 38 per cent, according to police-reported crime statistics for 2013, released by Statistics Canada last week. The rate of theft under $5,000 is
down 48 per cent, the break-andenter rate is down 49 per cent, and the motor vehicle theft rate is down 61 per cent. In that same period, between 2004 and 2013, the property crime rate is down 45 per cent. The crime rate decreases seen in Chilliwack over the decade mirror decreases seen provincwide. So why the reduction in crime? That’s a great sociological question of our time. There are demographic shifts, economic factors, social influences, all of which plays out in the shifting crime rates, according to University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) criminology professor Irwin Cohen. But here in British Columbia, Cohen credits frontline officers and integrated programs for at least some of the good news.
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BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
SHOP OUR ENTIRE PREOWNED INVENTORY
That includes targeting prolific offenders. “We continue to move more and more every day in police departments to being much more information-led, much more intelligence-led with a much greater focus on those small number of offenders that are responsible for a disproportionate number of crimes,” Cohen said. All about perception Across the board, most criminal code offences are on the decline. In Chilliwack, it should be noted that while over 10 years the crime rate is down 38 per cent, most of that was between 2004 and 2010. Over the last four years the rate has actually increased slightly (1.5 per cent). { See CRIME, page A4 }
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eff Karpes has both physical and mental reminders of the night just before Christmas 2012 when he was hit by two bullets in the chest near McCammon elementary school in Chilliwack. “I have PTSD so bad that I don’t even know where to begin to get t r e a t m e n t ,” h e told the Times in a phone interview July 25 from an undisclosed location. That was a day after attempted murder charges w e r e d r o p p e d Aaron Douglas against Aaron Douglas. “My head is disastrously messed up. My chest holds lead in it.” It was a sudden and surprising turn of events when the charge against Douglas was stayed mid-trial on July 24 in BC Supreme Court in Chilliwack. “Based on the evidence that had gone before the court we decided there was no substantial likelihood of conviction,” Crown lawyer Lori Stevens said of the decision. { See MURDER, page A16 }
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