Art Montague's Blog

Posted by Art Montague

This week's Crime 101 article about sex crime wasn't fun -- the subject isn't fun. In fact, it's such an emotional issue I had to do some soul-searching, and I came up with my somewhat cold-blooded side. Maybe that has to do with having raised four children and sometimes being almost nauseated at the thought of some whacko getting at them. Maybe it has to do with having a spate of grandchildren and still having the same concern.

I've saved the testiest material for next week's article and hope I can be forgiven for needing a cooling down period, so here goes.

Here are a couple of really funny tales from the past week's array of dumb crime:

A woman was busted for impaired driving and was duly placed in the back of the police car. She wriggled through the partition, got in the driver's seat and fled the scene, leaving the arresting cop standing on the roadside, notebook in hand. As if to make his case, about a mile up the road, she missed a turn and sent the police car sailing into a river, in which, of course, it promptly sank. Her defence should be very interesting, but definitely not water-tight.

In another case, a speeder's defence was definitely put out of joint - well, sort of. This dude ran radar and then kept right on going, constables in hot pursuit. They twisted, they turned, they got off pavement and churned gravel, swerved, swiveled, gunned engines, and squealed brakes. The speeder's dog, originally snoozing on the front passenger seat, had finally had enough. The dog attacked the driver, growling, snapping, chomping. Finally, the speeder pulled over. The arresting officer rushed him to a hospital. He took the tip of his nose in a handy doggie bag. With luck and a good surgeon, the speeder may recover the balance of his beak. As for the dog, the item didn't say.

Posted by Art Montague

Going back a few decades, say to the 50's, we discover that the so-called nuclear family wasn't all Ozzies and Harriets. Many people had to struggle to make ends meet. My dad was one such person.

Dad was a pretty fair backyard mechanic. He bought old cars and got them running (at least long enough for the buyer to drive a few miles away), then sold them through the local classifieds. He also did a little bootlegging on Sundays. At that time, beer and liquor stores were closed on Sundays.

The Sixties and Seventies weren't much different. Not every kid was able to wallow along through life like Beaver Cleaver or Opie.

Who remembers Marlon Brando portraying a bad ass biker in The Wild Ones? Hardly anyone, maybe, because he smoked cigarettes. More of us remember The Fonz, a cool Harley biker, who was everyone's "go-to" guy (and he didn't smoke.) But, be mindful, bad ass bikers in the form of outlaw bike gangs are now a major component of organized crime in Canada and the U.S.

How about the Beatles, exponents of Sixties sweetness, light, and universal love? And the Rolling Stones -- hard, coarse, raunchy. Except for the odd commemorative album or concert, The Beatles are now just Golden Oldies, wisps of maudlin nostalgia. The Rolling Stones? They're still in our face, a reminder that we have become a harder, coarser society.

So what's the point? The gap between dreams and reality has become filled with more than restless sleeps. It's more the stuff of nightmares.

Yet, people still find ways to make ends meet. Ignoring the law continues to be one, but the scale and prevalence of the possibilities have increased. Now it's no longer once in a while, it's every day. And the usual response? A shrug and the ubiquitous comment, "Whatever."

Posted by Art Montague

Most eye catching was the defense's argument for a lesser charge, not least being that the accused had killed the wrong "target(s)"-- ergo, the murders were not premeditated. Call the children's deaths "collateral damage."

The facts of the case, described in confessions: a lowlife, sometime minor police informant was accused around the neighborhood of having molested the son of a local single mother. His street rep besmirched, this character recruited a couple of buddies to deal with the mother.

Burning down the house with her in it was the plan they came up with, of course assuring each other, without firm foreknowledge, that the children wouldn't be at home. They torched the home with gasoline bombs. The mother escaped the inferno. The children died.

Atrocities like this one certainly provide grist for the pro-capital punishment mill. First is the crime itself. Then there's the gall to present such a defense, even when Canada's criminal code is clear that murder committed during the commission of another crime is capital murder. Fortunately, to the extent possible, the court found correctly

Of course, the three will serve their sentences segregated from other inmates. General prison populations take a dim view of suspected pedophiles, self-confessed police informants, and child murderers. "Gee, it was all a mistake, and I'm really sorry!" doesn't cut it inside prison walls.

Criminals certainly aren't alone in behaving bizarrely. Recently in the U.S., an execution was postponed because the convicted killer had gone insane. The court ordered medical treatment to restore enough sanity to insure the convict understood why he was being executed. Bully for humane treatment!

Posted by Art Montague

In my June 21 article on the high cost of crime, I spoke of equpment and human resources costs, but I did not touch on the statistical justifications for criminal justice budgets.

• Crime rates are often a function of incident-reporting frequency and data identification but collection techniques may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
• Criminal activity clearance rates in police departments are routinely inflated when perpetrators plea-bargain. Guilty/Not Guilty ratios are inaccurate because so few cases actually go to trial.
• Probation success rates are suspect because probation officers regularly carry caseloads so enormous they can't possibly provide supervision.
• Right up in the realm of grotesquely fiddled figures are parole success rates from some jurisdictions. Often a parolee who dies while still on parole is counted as a success, which helps, of course, to justify the parole department's budget.
• The dollar value of drug confiscations is routinely over-reported, if only because market values fluctuate constantly and vary widely from locale to locale.
• Consider, too, that financial institutions and retailers routinely under-report many losses due to fraud, identity theft, shoplifting, and employee theft. Accuracy would be bad PR. Anyway, these losses are passed down to the consumer, ensuring business bottom lines stay black.

Many of the pieces I write on the subject of crime may not include statistics or dollar figures. Too much of the data is flawed because of imperfect or self-interested research.

Accuracy is one of the greatest challenges facing the criminal justice system. Without that, assessing value for cost is moot. If anyone cares to discuss these points, I'm open.

Posted by Art Montague

Old-timers in prison lament that young people don't abide by the inmates' code. Probably when these old-timers were young, their old-timers were whining the same lament about them: The times, however, they are a-changing. Now it's every man for himself, or for the special interests of his gang.

The evolution, expansion, and diversification of street gangs exacerbate the dilemma. Today's law enforcement needs more than an Eliot Ness, a J. Edgar Hoover, or a Sam Spade. It needs flexibility, and it needs money. Mostly, in my view, it needs divorce from self-aggrandizing politicians, who too often tailor legislation to serve their own interests rather than those of their constitutents. Indeed, our political environment is a key factor in the fruition of these gangs.

As the bad guys get older -- if they survive -- they get wiser, wealthier, and more powerful. Incarceration, as noted in my article, is no big deal to the leadership because power is as much a lure to gang life as money. So is security -- a gang is a regular Band of Brothers.

No one reckoned on the strangling grip drugs would take on the throat of North America. As far as organized crime went, law enforcement was pre-occupied with destroying the Mafia, Cosa Nostra, Unione Siciliane, Black Hand - whatever one chooses to call it. Success left a vacuum which has been filled by biker gangs, ethnic gangs, prison gangs, and offshore gangs like those emanating from Nigeria.

On another note, check out my newest poll.

And, finally, a story that might leave readers pondering the wisdom of the courts. Year in and year out, a Toronto man deliberately ignored paying court-ordered support payments. Year in and year out, he would be sentenced to 30 days in jail for contempt of court. And year in and year out, he took his holidays from work to coincide with the jail term. For him, the sentence was a State-paid, all-inclusive vacation. He always came back to work refreshed. So it goes.