WINNIPEG

Stolen cars, stolen childhoods and stolen futures

LAST week I was telling you about the shock the justice system got when it discovered there were 200 little car thieves they didn't know about. That was more than double the caseload they knew about.

Well, now we know why there wasn't any record of them in the system. We can thank Doug Safioles, a 19-year veteran of the Winnipeg Police Service, for figuring it out. When Safioles joined the stolen car unit last spring he quickly noticed that even though police were making lots of arrests of high risk offenders the stolen vehicle rates weren't changing significantly.

"So the question was why?" he said.

What he discovered was police were using the discretion granted in the Youth Criminal Justice Act and simply catching and releasing first-time joy riders. Sometimes even second-time joy riders -- those are the passengers -- were simply being driven home. And even some of the kids charged for stealing the car were being missed in the reporting, too.

All of that has changed, Safioles told me. All the joyriders are charged now so they can be detoured into programs. Doing that early can make a big difference if it works because joyriding is the entry-level position into the entry level crime of stealing vehicles which, as Safioles has seen, is the shadowy road that leads to drug crimes and robberies.

Safioles has noticed something else about the kids who steal cars. They tend to have similar backgrounds. "They're usually a victim of something," Safioles said. "And they've usually done some shoplifting or a fire. And then they seem to move into stolen autos." By victim Safioles means a victim of an assault, physical or sexual, at an early age.

There's also another not-surprising commonality. Poverty. That brings me to Thursday's column about the mayor and his cabinet's decision to close Kelvin Community Centre in Elmwood, one of the city's poorest neighbourhoods. (Which, for the record, I mistakenly called Elmwood Community Centre.)

I suggested that MPI might want to divert some of the millions of dollars it spends on protecting most at risk cars into helping most at risk kids by giving grants to community centres in low-income neighbourhoods. But the mayor has said the problem is that there aren't enough volunteers at Kelvin to keep it open.

Tom Ellis, who lives in the area, says there are lots of volunteers because there are lots of new young families in the Elmwood area. "I believe in the old saying," Ellis wrote, "that the devil makes work for idle hands, and I would rather spend my time helping to keep this club open than cleaning graffiti off my property or looking for my car."

Of course there's a good reason city council won't change the mayor and his cabinet's mind about closing Kelvin Community Centre. It's too much trouble to reach out and try and help a kid from getting involved with crime. Arresting them is just way easier. And of course catching and releasing is even easier.

Gordon Sinclair Jr
20 January 2007

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscriber/local/story/3851046p-4455331c.html

home / Previous feature