RCMP and crime in the media
Aug. 4, 2006


Having experienced the challenge many times of trying to squeeze information out of the RCMP in the course of chasing a news story, I can’t imagine how much tougher the task will get if B.C.’s Mounties take the advice of their communications department and clam up further.
People in B.C. are much more fearful of being a victim of crime than they need to be, the department found in an internal report last year, made public this week after the Vancouver Sun got hold of a copy. The report speculates that the problem might be the volume of crime stories in the media.
If RCMP media officers weren’t quite so open and prompt in their dealings with the media, the report wonders, is it possible the media would fixate less on crime and people would calm down a little?
Two-thirds of the British Columbians surveyed as part of the report said they were fearful of being a crime victim sometime in the next year. Not even close to that many actually will be. These days, the fear of crime is considerably more prevalent than crime itself, the report notes.
I can see how you might conclude that the media had something to do with that. A month-long survey of undisclosed B.C. newspapers done as part of the report found that 67 per cent of all front-page stories in that period were about crime. While it’s hard to know what to make of that finding - what’s the “right” amount of crime news, anyway? - it’s still a significant statistic.
I wouldn’t want to see RCMP restricting crime information in an attempt to change that, however. This is our province. These are the police officers who we pay. We have a right to know what’s going on.
Beyond that, the media would simply dig up other sources to fill the void if RCMP became more reticent - sources that would almost certainly be less accurate, more speculative, and even more likely to frighten the uninformed reader or viewer. Crime reporting without access to accurate police information is truly a scary prospect.
But that’s not to cast aspersions on the main point of the report. The public perception of the likelihood of being a crime victim is seriously out of whack with the reality. We are scaring ourselves well beyond what’s actually necessary for our safety.
The front pages of B.C.’s newspapers certainly aren’t the only places where crime and violence take up a disproportionate amount of space. The most popular TV series these days feature epic levels of violence and crime, and unnecessarily grisly images aired at completely inappropriate times of day. Even cooking and home reno shows are filled with menace.
News of war pours into our homes every day as well. We need to know about them - in this global age, even the most distant wars hit home in one way or another.
But we also need to know what to do about it, rather than simply be left to grow ever more fearful. And the media have to assume some responsibility for that. Context needs to be put into stories of crime and conflict, to help us understand the reasons, the patterns, and the genuine risks to our communities.
Police themselves, however - and politicians - also have to answer for the culture of fear we find ourselves in. Crime is a powerful political tool that both groups have used as needed to scare voters into doing what they want.
Perhaps the cause at hand is more money for the police department, or the election of a law-and-order man. Convince the public to be very afraid, and all of a sudden the voters are on your side. But when interest groups and politicians scare up voters by conjuring the spectre of crime, the level of public anxiety increases.
What’s the truth of the matter? According to the RCMP report, British Columbians have a 14 per cent chance of being burgled in the next two years. Five per cent will be assaulted.
Those are still striking numbers, and of no comfort to the people who do end up the victims of crime. But it’s heartening news for the 85 to 95 per cent of us who aren’t affected in a typical year. We still live in a country where most of us do not routinely experience crime. If only we could allow ourselves to believe that.
The information must continue to flow from our police departments to the media. As tempting as it might be for the RCMP to believe that too much information is the primary problem in terms of perception of public safety, the issue is much more complex than that.
But maybe the leaked police report will finally get us talking about why we’re more worried than we need to be, and what we can do about it. This old world has troubles enough without us imagining it any worse.

Joys of exercise
July 29, 2006

I’ve been sitting in front of the keyboard for more than half an hour now, trying to come up with a way to talk about physical activity that conveys - without sounding preachy - what a fine, fine thing it is to have in your life. It’s not easy.
Exercise has had the misfortune of being linked in a beneficial way to so many health issues that it’s now one of those “healthy life choices” like quitting smoking, losing weight, and eating sufficient vegetables. Exercise is good for you - reason enough to deter anyone who has grown weary and resentful of the lengthening list of things to feel guilty for not doing.
But forget all that health business for a moment, and consider exercise for the truly joyful thing that it is. Sure, it’s good for you, but it would be something I’d be hooked on even if it wasn’t. What bothers me most about the fact that millions of Canadians are inactive isn’t that they’re making an unhealthy lifestyle choice, but that they don’t know what they’re missing.
Of all the people who have altered the course of my life over the years, I owe special thanks to the Courtenay Elementary teacher (name lost to time, unfortunately) who inadvertently got me into life-long exercise by organizing a ski day for my Grade 7 class.
Would I have ever have discovered exercise otherwise? Possibly - my parents were physically active, particularly my mother, and my young sub-conscious surely made note of that. But the ski trip was still the first time I recall reveling in the feeling of my body competently at work in the beautiful outdoors. Up until then, I’d always felt like a lump of a kid who couldn’t do much of anything sports-wise.
The ski trip didn’t change me over night. I was asthmatic as a child and continued to work that to the max in getting out of phys-ed classes during my school years. I never did warm up to team sports, and to this day continue to shun softball, volleyball, or any sport in which I stand a chance of letting the team down.
But as luck would have it in terms of early habits, my friends and I did a lot of walking in our teen years - the unexpected benefit of a small town with no other means of getting around. When 10-speed racers became an option, we rode to get places faster, and pretty soon were riding just for the fun of it.
Gradually, exercise became less of a chance event and more of a planned activity in my day. By my late 20s, it was part of the fabric of my life, like eating. I moved through aerobics to weight-lifting to yoga to running, and am lately considering drumming and dance. I suppose it’s kept me healthier, but I know for certain that it has kept me sane.
My years in journalism provided me with some amazing opportunities to put my body to work. I’ve learned that physical activity also helps me think better, and I came to love journalistic pursuits that combined writing and exercise.
The first such journey was the VisionQuest canoe trip from Hazelton to Victoria in 1997, which I joined for the final two weeks from Port Hardy to Victoria. The following year, an environmental boat tour of B.C.’s wild central coast introduced me to river hikes and old-growth exploration. The 1,000-kilometre Tour de Rock cancer fundraiser in 2001 was not only a powerful experience in its own right, but clarified for me the sport that I think I love best: Cycling.
But that’s just the splashy stuff. Walking up the hill to the Dominion Observatory on a bright summer evening is a rush all on its own. So is swimming Thetis Lake from one end to another. And on just about any morning - even a grey, rainy one - you can’t help but feel a little better for a walk down the Gorge waterway.
It’s not about being “athletic.” Believe me: It’s definitely not about that. It’s just about putting one foot ahead of the other and doing something that gets your body working. For me, it’s also about doing it outside, because there’s nothing like being out in the world for at least an hour every day.
So maybe you start out exercising because you think you have to. That’s certainly how I felt in the runup to the Grade 7 ski day. But soon you’re doing it because everything about it is great. You see new sights, breathe new air, get a big rush of endorphins AND it’s good for you.
Sure, it’s a healthy lifestyle choice. But don’t let that put you off. Anything that feels this good deserves to catch on.

Addiction
July 22, 2006

The latest survey on the habits of street-level injection drug users in the Capital Region is a grim little reminder of all the things we don’t yet get about addiction.
Since the last assessment in 2003, the only bright spot in the most recent survey is a two per cent decrease in the HIV rate. Virtually all other indicators - rates of hepatitis-C, amount of needle-sharing, condom use - have gone in the wrong direction.
As is our wont, we’ve talked and talked for years about addiction and drug use. If words were all it took, we’d be living in a drug-free paradise by now.
But we’re not. The Vancouver Island Health Authority’s newly released report on needle users in the downtown is most definitely proof of that.
Almost three-quarters of the 250 needle users surveyed by VIHA at two downtown social agencies last year tested positive for hepatitis-C, an increase of more than five per cent from the 2003 survey. Forty-two per cent reported sharing needles, also a five per cent increase.
Meanwhile, the number of needle users who had sex in the previous month without using a condom jumped 10 per cent between 2003 and 2005, to 65 per cent. The news gets even worse for the sex partners of those surveyed: almost a quarter of users with HIV or hepatitis-C hadn’t known they were infected prior to being tested as part of the VIHA study.
All of this is unfolding in a region that gives the appearance of working hard to combat the ravages of addiction. We’ve provided free access to clean needles and condoms for many years, and launched countless high-profile campaigns aimed at reducing risk behaviours.
More recently, we’ve sent the mayor to Europe to check out safe-injection sites, and debated in council meetings whether to install drop boxes around the city for users to dump their dirty needles. If ever there was a time and a place to attempt to be a “safe” and responsible needle user, here and now in the Capital Region is pretty much as good as it gets anywhere in Canada.
And such efforts are laudable. Consider how the stats might look by now had we continued to do nothing at all. As bad as things are among street-level needle users, they’d be significantly worse at this point if not for needle exchanges and other harm-reduction strategies. Ninety-two per cent of those surveyed in the VIHA report (www.viha.ca/about_viha/news/publications/) use local needle exchanges, and most said they’d frequent a safe injection site as well if the region had one.
But the problems of addiction won’t be dealt with as simply as making it easier and safer to use drugs. Addiction is what happens when hurting people with susceptible genetics discover something that takes the pain away. Drug use at that level is a complex behaviour far removed from the act that it appears to be on the surface.
On the streets, where the only “good times” are the brief moments before and after injecting, sharing needles can be the way people express friendship and trust. It can also be the way they express self-loathing, something of which they’re all very familiar with.
For one young needle user I know, it’s all about getting the drugs into her body as quickly as possible, before she has to think about it. If that means sharing a needle, or shooting herself up in the neck or straight through her filthy pant leg despite having been cautioned against both acts dozens of times, so be it.
There are ways to help her, and others as well. But they don’t exist in the Capital Region. Small wonder, then, that problems are worsening.
Clean needles and safe places to use drugs are just one piece of the puzzle. If we’re ever to get a handle on addiction, we need to rethink our entire strategy.
Family support. A place to live. A sense of belonging. Sober and happy pregnancies. Drug treatment. Mental-health care. Hope for the future. It all matters.
The VIHA report, done in conjunction with the Public Health Agency of Canada, barely scratches the surface around the full impact of substance abuse.
With surveys conducted only at Streetlink and the downtown needle exchange, any of the region’s 1,500 to 2,000 injection drug users who don’t use street services were automatically excluded. Women were also underrepresented, again because of the survey sites (most of Streetlink’s clients are male).
So as troubling as the VIHA survey is, it’s still just a partial picture. There’s a firestorm coming, and somebody’s going to have to do something about that.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com

The Stephen Hawking solution
July 14, 2006

Deep thinker Stephen Hawking has gone looking for answers to how we will save our troubled world, and more than 22,000 people have weighed in so far. Their answers are at times sweet and at other times alarming, as you might expect from a random sampling of on-line opinion.
“In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally,” asked Hawking last week on the Yahoo Answers Web site, “how can the human race sustain another 100 years?” (Yes, notes the site, this is the “real” Stephen Hawking, recruited by Yahoo to post the question after touching on the same topic recently in Hong Kong.)
Hawking is something of a star recruit on a Web site that is striving to be seen as harvesting the collective wisdom of the world through its questions. He’s an astrophysicist and a mathematician with a decidedly philosophical bent, and maintains a global schedule of speech-making despite being almost fully paralyzed. Who wouldn’t be honoured to have a guy like that single you out for posting the best answer?
From my brief foray into the answers, I’d say that the viewpoints divvy up fairly equally between cheery optimism and end-of-the-world pessimism, with quite a number of doomed-but-hopefuls rounding out the mix.
“The only solace is that every generation has thought the same things,” noted one posting in response to Hawking’s question.
Hawking’s own answer, as delivered June 13 in that Hong Kong speech, falls solidly into the pessimistic camp. He believes the survival of the human race depends on its ability to relocate elsewhere in the universe. If humans can manage to avoid killing themselves off entirely over the next century, said Hawking, their big challenge will be to find new homes on space settlements independent of Earth.
His solution resonates among some of the answerers, who agree that the only hope for the future will be to abandon Earth and start over. “We might have to find a way to expand to another solar planet,” offers one.
Others put forward thoughts that at their best are sincere and caring, and at their worst are warm and fuzzy to the point of being completely unhelpful in terms of actually doing anything. “The Human spirit will overcome,” posted one such writer. “It’s within us, dude - we’re fighters and survivors.”
I place myself in the doomed-but-hopeful category - not nearly so gloomy as to think that we’ll be writing off the planet within a century, but still damn worried. With the lives of my children and grandchildren to consider, however, I have to hope for the best.
To me, the key to saving our world is to act. Take the neglected neighbour kid to a movie once in a while. Join one of a couple hundred service clubs that are dying for lack of new members and raise money for something terrific. Learn about the impact from some distant war, and do whatever is within your reach to do.
And keep doing it. “In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult,” noted the late pop philosopher Og Mandino.
As a “solution,” I admit my strategy for saving the world smacks of mom and apple pie. But is that wrong? Sure, we owe a great deal to the big men with big plans who got us to this point in our history, but it’s going to take a more delicate hand at the wheel to guide us through the current turbulence. A lot more mom and apple pie strikes me as exactly what’s needed.
In the Yahoo poll, count me in with the cryptically named URez2Read, a 32-year-old from parts unknown who sums up the good and bad of the human condition.
“Our future is what we make of it,” posts URez. “The question is: Will we make the effort to guarantee the survival of our species, or will we be at the top of the endangered species list?

Women and the glass ceiling
June 30, 2006

If the goal is to do what men do, then women still have a long way to go. We are creeping toward gender equality - at least the kind measured by big jobs and big money - at a glacial pace, and even losing ground on some fronts.
Perhaps it’s not too surprising given the findings of an international survey on the subject this month. The study by Catalyst - a U.S. non-profit that keeps an eye on women’s progress in the corporate world - found that around the world, people believe that women are better at “taking care” and men at “taking charge.”
Even countries approaching gender equity - socially minded places like Sweden and Finland - held that belief, Catalyst found. The findings provide at least one reason why women don’t make it to the top jobs: The world continues to think that men do those jobs better.
We all know women who have done exceptionally well in business and politics, of course, and men who are community-minded and nurturing. But I’ve come to think there’s some truth to women being a certain way and men being another. It could be argued that female workers are concentrated in the taking-care professions because they’re good at it. And what’s so bad about being good at “taking care”?
Probably nothing if all things were equal. But they’re not.
Being the type who takes care can, for instance, translate in the real world into looking after people for free: Your hard-charging partner; your children; somebody else’s children; eventually your aging parents - in most cases, nobody’s going to pay you for any of that. The ability to take care is a treasured societal value, but there’s no treasure attached.
If this were a world where money didn’t matter, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be the gender perceived as being better at “taking care.” If your fella is better at loping across the veldt in search of tomorrow’s supper and you’re better at maintaining the homefires and community connections, what’s to worry? If both roles are equally valued and rewarded, no problem.
Unfortunately, they aren’t. One path at least has the potential to lead to wealth and status. The other will barely keep you in pocket change.
Jobs that involve “taking care” don’t pay nearly as well as take-charge jobs, and are at the most risk of being cut in a downturn of government funding. Take-care types are rarely sought to run governments or chair major initiatives. That cuts them out of public policy and other decision-making.
On the home front, take-care work - raising your children, caring for a brother with a mental handicap, looking after your elderly mom in her final years - doesn’t pay a dime. In many cases, there’s even a financial penalty for doing the work, should the caregiver end up having to subsidize the cost of services for a family member in addition to providing free care.
The sticking points, then, are money and power. If being the gender that takes care paid just as well as if we’d taken charge, and garnered equal respect, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to just give into it. Maybe we could leave men to be men and women to be women - different but equal, and equally rewarded and valued for the work they do.
But knowing that the real world is nothing like that, you can understand why women’s organizations like Catalyst keep talking about the need to push more of us through the glass ceiling. Being classified as the gender that’s better at taking care than taking charge shuts women out of both the money and the decision-making.
What’s the value of a good mother? What is it worth to a society to have their old people cared for at home by family members? There’s an amount there somewhere, a dollar value for the work that’s being done. Past studies have tried to calculate bits and pieces of the complex cost issue, but no one has yet come close to establishing the worth of unpaid labour in our communities, most of it done by women.
Money talks. Perhaps this business of who takes care and who takes charge in our world needs to come down to costing out the actual worth of of the service, which would at least give us a starting point for discussions around tax breaks, wage programs and innovative strategies for the kind of work women do.
Sure, everybody talks a good game about being thankful for those who are good at taking care. What would take-charge types do without them?
But gratitude doesn’t pay the bills. If the world thinks women are good at caring, then we need to set a price to that work that puts it on par with the take-charge work of men. As long as everything’s equal, there’s nothing wrong with being different.