Whether it's crime or crime statistics, you just can't get away with anything these days.
After my crime diary "Adjournments, boredom and statistics" (Yorkton This Week, October 17, 2012) I received a call from Statistics Canada. It appears the national number crunchers are monitoring media that mentions them.
In that column I wrote, "Also, Statistics Canada crime statistics are based on police-reported crimes, which do not include failure to comply."
Kathy AuCoin, chief of data access and data development for the agency, assured me they do, in fact, keep stats on failure to comply charges, which, in fact, I knew.
In retrospect, I should have been more specific about the data set I was referencing. StatsCan provides a plethora of information products. The table I was looking at was selected statistics on police-reported incidents of crimes against persons and crimes against property, not including traffic offences.
My bad, but I am confident the column was, nevertheless, accurate and my conclusions were reasonable.
In the process, Ms. AuCoin was nice enough to send me the Juristat report from the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics: Offences against the Administration of Justice, 1994/95 to 2003/04.
It has become a fairly common perception, I think, that the gears of justice grind slowly. I was not fully aware, however, just how much of a problem it has become. The report shows the proportion of adults charged with at least one offence against the administration of justice (failure to comply, unlawfully at large, breach of probation etc.) jumped from 17 per cent in 1998 to 22 per cent in 2004. The proportion of cases before the courts that involved at least one administration of justice offence (AJO) rose from 22 per cent to 31 per cent. Finally, multiple-charge cases that involved AJOs increased from 27 per cent to 36 per cent. The numbers are even higher for youth court.
A quick count of Monday's provincial court docket in Yorkton yields similar results. Of 81 non-traffic-related criminal code charges, 25, or 31 per cent, were offences against the administration of justice.
Why is this a problem?
Section 11 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees a person's right to be tried within a reasonable time. "Reasonable," of course, is a relative term. Complexity of a case, availability of witnesses, disclosure elements, availability of court resources etc., all contribute to the length of time that might be considered reasonable.
The one thing that is certain, though, is that AJOs increase the duration of cases before the courts.
In 1994, the average length of time for clearing single-charge cases was 121 days. By 2004, it was 215 days, an increase of 77 per cent.
On the youth side of the equation, the Young Offenders Act (1988) and the Youth Criminal Justice Act (2003), have increased the number of AJOs youth can be charged with, which would naturally lead to more charges.
There is very little analysis available as to why the rate of AJOs is also increasing for adults. One literature review conducted by the Alberta Department of Justice speculates that the justice system presents unreasonable barriers, particularly with respect to AJOs, to Aboriginal people who are severely over-represented in the statistics.
In any event, something must be done to unclog the courts. Obviously the increasing number of AJOs represents not only a huge impact on the efficiency of the courts and the ability of accused persons to be tried in a timely manner, but also the already high cost of delivering justice is skyrocketing.
