The movie The Warriors begins with a midnight meeting of New York City gangs. The leader of the Gramercy Riffs, Cyrus, proposes that all the gangs present stop war with each other and create an alliance because together they greatly outnumber the cops and would be unstoppable.
It’s felt, as of late, that Guelph’s own criminal cabal might have had a similar meeting. The bike thieves, the pan handlers, the smash and grabbers, the public masturbators, and the con artists all got together and decided they were going to take this town.
Poor, sleepy, friendly, ripe-for-the-plucking Guelph.
This, obviously, is a pantomime. Despite what years of crime movies have taught us, crime is rarely so meticulously organized, but anecdotally it seems like it’s only a matter of time before Joker and Scarecrow knock over the local Meridian branch and lead the Guelph Police on a high speed chase down the Hanlon.
What’s not an exaggeration is that crime is increasing in the Royal City.
Stats Canada reported last month that Guelph jumped 15 per cent in one year on the crime severity index, just one point more than our neighbours in Waterloo Region.
In 2017, Guelph saw about 130 more break and enters, about 60 more incidents of fraud, and about 40 more sexual assaults reported. When all’s said and done, the index, which counts the number of crimes in a city but weighs them according to severity, puts Guelph literally in the middle of the pack: we’re 17 out of 34 among the safest municipalities in Canada.
Obviously, we should be concerned about the increase, and I would never tell a victim of crime that their personal damage be it emotional, physical, or property-based is irrelevant in the light of statistics, but just because we’ve moved a few rungs down on the MoneySense ranking of the Best Places to live, it doesn’t mean we have to hit the panic button.
Do that, and the guy pleasuring himself while riding his bicycle wins.
But seriously, there’s been a perhaps not-so-surprising round of over-the-top reactionism on social media to all this crime talk, and really not just crime.
Online, I see people talking about being afraid to go downtown. Afraid of the homeless people panhandling. Afraid of drug users and people with mental health issues. Afraid that they’ll leave their bike somewhere locked up and that it will be gone when they get back.
Again, not to say those concerns are invalid, but let me counter with a suggestion, a word that you might need to think about if you’re decrying all those “awful” people that are dragging the quality of life in Guelph down: privilege.
I know I’ve quoted Herman Melville before, but it’s a quote I can’t ever get out of my head on this issue: “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”
The presumption is that these people are wanting to make you uncomfortable. They want you to feel afraid. But do you think someone struggling with their inner demons, or struggling to survive without a job, or a place to live, is thinking about your level of comfort?
Of course, they’re not. That’s privilege talking.
Here’s a benign example. I was watching the evening news Tuesday night, and the weather reporter was talking about how the day of the great blackout 15 years earlier was also a hot, sunny day. She observed that it was probably uncomfortable for people during the blackout when all the air conditioners were off.
Did you spot the privilege?
It was the idea that people with air conditioners suffered when they had no power to run them. She assumed that living without A/C isn’t an everyday reality for people unwilling or unable to pay the associated high electricity bills.
If you have the money, the heat is something you can cope with; if you don’t, it’s something you have to suffer through.
Meanwhile, those homeless people — of whom we’re apparently so afraid — also suffer in the heat, and they do suffer. While for many of us, the summer means sitting by the pool or enjoying a cold drink on a patio, this year’s heatwaves (plural) have resulted in nearly 100 deaths in Quebec alone.
Getting out of the heat? That’ll cost you $952 per month for a one-bedroom apartment, assuming you can find one.
The average payout to people in Guelph on social assistance is just over $700.
Could it be that our problems have more to do with the fact that you still fall $200 short for an apartment you’ll never get using all the money you might ever get in a month as opposed to rampant criminality?
I know from personal experience that reactionism feels good, but it doesn’t address the real problems and causes. We’re not living through a crime wave, we’re living through a social crisis, and it might take effort for everyone to see that.
