Car theft is mostly a victimless crime

Car jackings are at the lowest rates they've been since 1977

There was a night in November years ago where I was eating supper with my kids. They were young, maybe four, and my partner was staying late at work; something that he rarely did.

During supper, one of my kids looked up and said, “Mummy, there’s a crack on the ceiling.” And indeed there was. It appeared, it grew and within minutes, my appartment was flooding.

There’s a certain kind of surprise watching your appartment slowly be destroyed. It was like being in the middle of a fire. Water came in from multiple points. A plaster bubble that grew to 2 feet by 3 feet formed. I got a clean-up company on the phone. Within 30 minutes, strangers were breaking through plaster and century-old waterlogged insulation to liberate paths for the water to travel.

The flood took out two rooms worth of ceiling. We were pushed into living in a quarter of the appartment for three months while everything was repaired. Unlike a fire of similar size, repair work was possible and, after three months, everything was back to normal. Which was good — I was getting tired of eating supper on the floor.

It cost us a bit of money but insurance covered most of the clean-up, $40,000 all in. It was sad, scary and irritating as hell, but I’m no victim as a result of those three months. In fact, I only think of that time when I look up from the dinner table.

Victimhood is a funny thing. Who we determine to be a victim is deeply tied to our personal worldview. For me, I understand a victim to be someone whose life is irrevocably impacted, negatively, by forces they cannot control. You’re not a victim if things can be made well through consumption. You’re a victim if you’ve experienced something that means that you’ll never again be the person you were before.

Victimhood is also very in vogue these days. The far right seeks out victim status in every corner of our society - from vaccines to muh freeeddooom - there is caché in being a victim. Politicians know this too and so they play up certain kinds of victimhood (the kinds that they can fix instantly in some people’s minds with things like jail or punishment) while ignoring those victims who become victims as a result of political decisions.

News that Canada is experiencing record-high, never-before-seen car thefts have been all over the place in the past two days. This is because Pierre Poilievre has promised to throw car jackers in jail and journalists ran away with it.

My immediate, half-serious reaction, that jailing people for a victimless crime is ridiculous, caught a lot of heat. Thousands of men told me how much they love their cars, how their cars hold them at night and make love to them. My emails and direct messages filled up with lots of “if you steal my car I will kill you”s and “where do you live so I can steal your cars”es. The people were mad that I could assert such a thing.

And yet, by the standard of victimhood above, it’s mostly true. Having your car stolen might increase your insurance but otherwise, meh. It’s just stuff. Stuff isn’t life. And sure, if you want to say that you would be made a victim of a car theft, be my guest. Identify how you’d like.

At the heart of the outrage around this wave of car jackings is the belief that private property is sacred; something that I reject. It’s the formulation that this object is so premordial that anything that may befall a car, whether a jacking or an overpacked highway, is a personal attack on the car’s owner.

It’s silly.

Now, I’m not saying that we should encourage car jacking. That would also be silly. The fact that cars are being manufactured with remote starters that are easy to hack is a public policy problem that politicians need to figure out a plan to stop. I’m also not saying that when someone has a car stolen they shouldn’t be sad or angry or irritated. They should be whatever they want to be, a victim included.

But we should be really clear about the real issue here: there is no spike in car thefts in Canada.

Here is data that was mapped by columnist Chris Selly.

In 2021, average vehicle theft sfor all of Canada was 217 per 100,000 people. That is less than half the rate that it was in 2001.

217 is also pretty low, historically. Between 1977 and 2002, the spike in that time period was around 1996 at just over 600 per 100,000 people and at its lowest in 1983, it was still higher than the rate of theft today.

Despite these trends, journalists write about car jackings as if they’re at record highs. Like this from Victoria Wells for the Financial Post, “The rate of auto theft has risen to a record high in the past year.” The article doesn’t give the rate of theft as it’s cribbed from this press release.

And, because cars are so collectively dear to us and because the media follows Pierre Poilievre’s talking points so closely, this is what CBC News’ homepage looked like last night.

That’s right — seven stories at the top of the page (above the digital fold) about an issue that isn’t even at record highs. It’s worth noting too that finding rates and overall numbers is not that easy. The vast majority of the news that I’ve read on car jackings only refers to percentage increases. As 2020 was a year where car jackings were the lowest they had been since data was collected, of course numbers will rise in the years that follow.

Look: this issue warrants reporting. Certainly, some communities have been hit harder by this wave of car jackings than others and writing about waves of property crime is what passes for news in Canada so yes, have at it. Politicians have made it a priority already: Canada announced that it was organizing a national summit on car jackings just two weeks ago. But of all the issues that are going on right now, there is a reason why car jacking is getting outsized attention: because it’s an easy non-issue that can be used to distract from the difficult issues that are plaguing society, from homelessness to the cost of food, and even car accidents.

Car jacking is a tale as old as cars and the narrative around it needs to be sober. It has to reflect overall trends and not simply distract and instill fear in average people for no reason.

Besides, if this issue is typified by buddy in the last story above at CBC, having the same truck stolen twice and still getting it back, then we’re in an OK place. If having the same thing stolen twice and then getting it back makes someone a victim, I wish more people who were victims of violence were victims like that.

Because what’s really happening is that Conservatives are using this as a narrative to boost their bullshit tough-on-crime agenda, cops are using this issue to justify non-stop increases to police budgets and journalists are playing along. And we forget the real victims, the 1,768 people who died on a Canadian road in 2021 or the 108,018 Canadians who were injured (105,673 cars were stolen that same year), and whose families are grieving, the accident victims who can’t get access to the healthcare they need, and roads continue to fill with vehicular traffic causing too many people to grow ulcers and anxiety disorders. But hey, even those crimes are trending down.

No wait, we don’t consider car accidents to be crimes.

post script …

Wait, how many vehicles were stolen?