Crime Story

Crime is out of control.

Driven by an increase in social disorder, some crime stats show a shocking jump from previous years, and Hamiltonians are feeling unsafe in their own community. That feeling hasn’t been helped by the fact that, thanks to some tense interactions before the last election, the Hamilton Police began stocking up on new, more intense weaponry. Residents across the city have a deep sense of unease and distrust.

In response, the Hamilton Police budget has ballooned. An exasperated Chief of Police keeps repeating that the force simply can’t hire enough officers to make residents feel safe. Some truly upsetting crime trends, like sexual offenses involving children, have been climbing. And some large-scale police operations - dramatic, frightening, and involving illegal guns - have just added to a perception that the city is increasingly lawless.

With an election coming up, the mayor makes a dramatic call for a community-wide meeting on crime, hoping it will signal to Hamiltonians that their municipal government is working overtime to make them feel safe and secure in their community. With any luck, that conference and the boost to police funding will have a noticeable impact before the municipal election, where concerns about spending, municipal dysfunction, and public health may take a back seat to fears of a crime wave crashing over Hamilton.

But the mayor is confident that a soft-on-crime label won’t stick. Known across the city, for better or for worse, the mayor always knows how to turn an election around. It’s been done it plenty of times before and any feeling in the community about a crime wave - real or imagined - can’t stop the mayor’s mighty electoral machine, especially as possible opponents waffle on the prospect of entering the race.

Hamiltonians may have thoughts on crime, but it’s unclear that will impact the mayor’s chances.

The mayor, with the confidence that so many have come to expect, isn’t giving up without a fight.

He is Vic Copps, after all.

***

Amidst the jubilation of the Centennial year - 1967 - Hamiltonians flew into a panic over the city’s crime rate.

Statistics released that summer showed that crime had jumped in the city by 11.4%, mirroring a province-wide trend. Crimes associated with social disorder were leading the spike. The Hamilton Police reported increases of 333% for charges of prostitution, 167% for illegal gambling, and 123% for “general wounding”. There were 796 more petty thefts in 1966 than in 1965, 418 more break and enters, and the same number more assaults. Particularly upsetting was the 110% increase in charges laid relating to sexual assaults, with a notable spike in the number involving minors.

The Deputy Chief, Gerald Reed, told the Spec that “the increase in crime here is consistent with that across the North American continent.”¹ But it would not have been a stretch for any aspiring magistrate to pin the blame on Victor Copps, Hamilton’s dynamic mayor since 1962.

Police Chief Leonard Lawrence was quick to provide some context, though. The increase in crime, he told the Spec, had been attributed to new reporting methods and a boost in funding to the Vice Squad. Particularly as it related to the increases in charges relating to gambling and sex work, Lawrence said “because of aggressive work by our Vice Squad…we have made more arrests and have concentrated in these areas, therefore the number of occurrences show an increase.” But he also took the opportunity to call for more funding and more officers, bemoaning the fact that the force was “18 men below strength last year [1966].”²

Lawrence’s attempts at calming the population were likely thrown off by a daring raid carried out by the Hamilton Police, in conjunction with other local police forces and the RCMP, in early September of 1967. After a multi-agency probe uncovered militant cells of anti-communist Yugoslavian forces operating in the area, the Hamilton Police conducted a massive operation, seizing 22 illegal guns and over 2,700 rounds of ammo from seven homes. The weapons were tied to a local right-wing, monarchist Orthodox priest, whom the Mounties feared might try to harm Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, visiting Montreal that month to see his country’s pavilion at Expo ‘67.³  

The bad news for Mayor Copps kept coming when, in December of that year, the Spec reported that the budget for the Hamilton Police kept increasing, reaching the then-unheard of sum of $4,586,390. The City’s Police Commission (a forerunner to the Police Services Board) accepted the budget as presented with no amendments, happy to provide Chief Lawrence with enough funds to hire 12 more officers (6 shy of the number he wanted).⁴

Committed to getting ahead of the story before the 1968 municipal election, Copps called for a “top-level conference” on crime. That eventually became a serious sit-down with Lawrence and the Police Commission. Heading into the election year, the reporting on crime became more nuanced. Lawrence told the Spec that statistics could be misleading, pointing to a 100% increase in sexual assaults from January of 1967 to January of 1968; the staggering figure was because the number jumped from 0 to 1. And other things that might indicate a crime wave could easily be explained. A jump in the number of fraud cases was because the Hamilton Police broke up a counterfeiting ring and a spike in car thefts was found to have been thanks to “the growing number of persons leaving their cars unlocked or with the keys in the ignition…especially in bad weather.”⁵

By the middle of the year, the tide had turned. The previous year’s 11.4% increase in crime had been whittled down to a scant 3.3%, driven mainly by more charges being laid by the Vice Squad, and those pesky car thefts that so bothered Hamilton’s motorists.⁶

With Hamiltonians at peace, crime was barely an issue in the 1968 election, despite the city’s opposition threatening to run at the mayor from the right. Indeed, one of Copps’ most vocal opponents opted to avoid the 1968 election entirely. Former Mountain council member Brian Morison - who ran an aggressive right-wing campaign against Copps in 1966 that took aim at the mayor for his failed run for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party in ‘64 and included a Spec ad claiming Hamilton’s mothers were “afraid to use our parks” because of violent crime - quietly slipped into broadcasting, becoming CHML’s “local political analyst” for the municipal campaign.⁷

Crime was only mentioned occasionally, with mountain residents calling for more police patrols in their new, suburban neighbourhoods, and Communist Party-backed Board of Control candidate Harry Hunter saying that the police should not have funding for “chemical and other forms of crown control” equipment, referencing the force’s purchase of tear gas two years prior.⁸ Few candidates for public office thought it pertinent to discuss “fighting crime” in their campaigns; indeed, many would have found the idea an unsophisticated and unbecoming tactic for a respectable civic leader.

And with that, the crime panic of ‘67 fizzled out with a whimper.

The parallels between 1967 and 2026 are striking, to say the least.

An increasing police budget, concerns over gun violence, charges relating to social disorder creating a perception of an unsafe city, an increase in crimes against the most vulnerable, and a politically-savvy mayor keen to get ahead of the story before an upcoming municipal election.

But, as Marx so astutely observed in The18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “come on, Hamiltonians, learn your damn history already.”

Or something like that.

***

There have been other “crime waves” in Hamilton’s history. In the depths of the Great Depression, a rash of petty thefts, safe crackings, and a few high-profile murders dominated headlines through 1935. The city’s new chief promised to come down hard on crime and, by year’s end, boasted an 80% conviction rate (leaving out the inconvenient fact that all those charged with murder were acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence).⁹  

A nine-month spree by the “Alley Arsonist” in downtown Hamilton that caused over $1 million in damages stoked fears of another crime wave in 1993, particularly as the recession dragged the city deeper and deeper into its post-industrial slump.¹⁰  

And an early 2000’s crime wave was deemed to have been stopped after the Hamilton Police Service (HPS) declared “war on crack cocaine”, which they claimed help prevent everything from break-ins to sexual assaults. “The whole drug culture is the engine that drives crime in the community,” the then-Deputy Chief told the Spec.¹¹

But, in each of those instances where our city was said to have sunk into the pits of depravity, the feeling that crime was on the rise seemed to be driving the conversation. In 1935, the “crime wave” was thanks to a few gangs of organized criminals robbing banks. It took a 40-person taskforce to figure out that the “Alley Arsonist” that terrorized Hamilton in ‘93 was actually just a bunch of bored teenagers setting fire to garbage cans. And, despite their claims that their “war on drugs” made Hamilton safer in 2004, statistics indicate that crime had actually been on a downward trajectory since even before the dawn of the new millennium, regardless of the HPS’s early ought’s fixation on crack.¹²  

The current moment shares a lot with those imagined “crime waves” as well.

On December 30, 2025, a “new” poll from Liaison dropped. “New” is in quotation marks as this poll is just more data from the same big “2026 municipal election” poll done by Liaison Strategies and the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada that I wrote about on November 10. They sure are getting a lot of mileage out of this one poll they did over the 22nd and 23rd of October last year.

Like the other data released from the poll, this block of info includes some responses from a statistically-notable number of Hamiltonians (800, to be exact).

When asked the question: “In general, would you say that crime in Canada as a whole has increased, stayed the same, or decreased over the past year?”, an overwhelming majority of Hamiltonians - 74% - answered “increased”. Across all age categories, respondents from Hamilton were under the impression that crime was on a steady upswing throughout 2025. When asked about crime in Hamilton specifically, over 70% of respondents believed that murder, assaults, robberies, break-and-enters, and fraud have all increased as well. A marginally smaller number of respondents - 68% and 67% respectively - said that car thefts and hate crimes had increased as well.

No matter how you cut it, over 2/3 of Hamiltonians think that crime is up up up.

One tiny problem: it isn’t.

The Spec was able to get full crime data from the HPS for 2025 which showed a marked decrease in nearly every category of crime. Auto thefts are down 36%, homicide is down 30%, break-and-enters are down 29.5%, robberies are down 21%, and assaults are down by a modest 2%. The only category where trends are consistently and troublingly increasing is when it comes to hate crimes, which are up 5% since 2024 and a mind-numbing 286% since 2020.¹³ We likely won’t get a full hate crime breakdown until sometime in the summer, but the numbers for 2024 showed that members of the Black (79), queer (72), and Jewish (53) communities were the most targeted (here’s a piece I wrote on that last year) and are likely to remain the groups that face the most hate.

Police Chief Frank Bergen spelled this out very clearly during the Community Safety Summit last November, telling the assembled group: “We can statistically tell you that the crime severity index in the city is going in the right direction, but the perception of safety is not there.”

There are a few theories as to why there’s this disconnect.

David Valentin, who runs Liaison Strategies, told the Spec that he believes “the gap stems from the media people consume, whether it be the news or posts on social media,” saying that he, personally, has seen a lot of videos of crime on TikTok.¹³

Toronto-based sensationalist news outlet CP24 reported on this survey when it came out at the end of December. The network’s confused hosts laid out the findings for Toronto (which, again, showed 76% of people believe crime has been surging) and contrasted that with the reality that crime is on the decline in the big city. Without even a shred of irony, they mused about how strange that was, before continuing with their wall-to-wall coverage of stabbings, murders, and public drug use, punctuated by looping roll of Ring camera footage of trucks being stolen by masked gangs in Markham, Mississauga, and Brampton.

The Spec also interviewed Anthony Doob, a former criminology prof at U of T who noted that individual crimes can have “ripple effects”, leading people to believe that an area is unsafe if one or a few highly publicized crime occurred in that location.¹³

A team of researchers from Sweden noted something similar in a survey of older adults and their perceptions of crime. While they found that fear of crime isn’t the primary concern of older people (isolation and health are top-of-mind), there are some who are deeply fearful of crime. This is usually because they believe crime is rising, stay home or avoid social situations out of fear, become more fearful, isolate themselves further, believe crime is going up even more, etc. This creates what the researchers called a “fear of crime loop”. The only way to address this, they note, is to make people feel safe. “A greater sense of safety and trust might mitigate the perceived threat of crime,” they note.¹⁴

That can be tough because of another theory posited by Doob, namely that “People think crime is up because everyone is saying it is.”¹³

The idea that crime is “out of control” was among the central themes repeated ad nauseam by many of the leading candidates in the Ward 8 by-election held last year. Second-place candidate Terry Whitehead went so far as to rent a fake “Batmobile” to show how he would tackle what he called “the out-of-control crime in the City of Hamilton”. And the first of six skimpy platform points of the eventual winner, Rob Cooper, was “Tackle Violent Crime”.

This locks the community in that “fear of crime loop”. Politicians say crime is rising, people become fearful of crime, they tell pollsters they believe crime is on the rise, they vote for candidates who promise to get tough on crime, those politicians say crime is rising…and so on.

But, of course, there’s another theory. The Spec article grazed past it, noting the results of another survey done by researchers at Wilfrid Laurier University in conjunction with the HPS. The biggest concerns for respondents in that particular sample were, as the HPS noted in their press release on the survey, “social disorder, open drug use, and property crime.”

A commenter on the r/Hamilton subreddit summarized that in the context of the Liaison poll wonderfully when they wrote: “I think 99% of the time when people are talking about crime, what they actually mean is public disorder (i.e. visible homelessness, public intoxication on drugs, etc.).”

We don’t have the full list of questions asked by Liaison, only what they deemed it appropriate to share with the public. But when asking a question as broad as “In general, would you say that crime in Canada as a whole has increased, stayed about the same, or decreased over the past year?” it is almost a certainty that some people will conflate “crime” and “disorder”.

There’s that word again.

I brought it up when writing about the “scaffolding” raised in front of the York Boulevard Salvation Army centre, noting that Globe and Mail columnist Robyn Urback opined about the growing “disorder” in Canadian cities and how the only way to stop it is to line up behind big, strong dads like Bradford Bradford, the Toronto city councillor already campaigning against Olivia Chow for the city’s mayoralty in October.

And, as we lumber toward the October municipal election, we here in Hamilton have our fair share of aspiring candidates and political movers-and-shakers trying to make disorder the central theme of the campaign.

They point to encampments, social service providers, and people living with mental illnesses and addictions as proof that Hamilton has become a lawless wasteland where mothers are scared to take their children to parks, women can’t walk the streets alone at night, and families cower in fear at the prospect of entering the lower city. Endless references to the “Gage Park bike chop shop” and the “dangerous illegal guns” found in encampments float around social media as “proof” that we need our own big, strong dads to unseat the woke coven of The Ladies and The Gays (Plus Craig)™ and bring swift, brutal justice to the law-abiding taxpayers of Hamilton.

But scratch the surface, even just a little, and the whole thing falls apart. The “disorder” in Gage Park? Eight bikes, presumed stolen, and “components of a long-arm gun” that were not intact and inoperable.¹⁵

And the fixation on “dangerous” encampments? Just today, the Spec reported that, as of the last “point-in-time” enumeration of people experiencing homelessness, just 244 actively lived in encampments or other outdoor locations.¹⁶ To date, there have been no quantifiable metrics, no statistics, no identifiable and tangible and grounded connections between the presence of an encampment and/or people experiencing homelessness and a spike in crimes. No data, no figures, no comments from police, nothing. Just a load of feelings shared by people who see disorder, who have been told by cynical politicians that crime is surging, who are shown a near-endless loop of Ring cam footage of thefts on television, who are scared and isolated and growing more scared and more isolated day by day.

Put bluntly, we have politicians in this community - elected leaders and likely candidates - who are baselessly stoking fears about a non-existent crime wave and preying on feelings of insecurity, in large part by dehumanizing people living with mental illness and addiction, all to bolster their chances of electoral victory on October 26, 2026.

And, ultimately, it might work to their advantage.

The political right dominates the crime conversation, in part because they offer simple, familiar solutions. Crime is on the rise, they say, so we should hire more police, pass tougher laws, and open more jails. And anyone who even questions the police budget or suggests we look at strengthening social services instead of the force, must be hounded for their transgressions from now until the end of time.

In this case, there is no crime wave on which they can capitalize. So, instead, they point to the social disorder around us - disorder created and enabled by levels of society-destroying inequality, injustice, and poverty about which they have little to say (or, in some cases, actively support) - call it “crime”, and instill as much fear as possible to fit with their narrow agenda.

***

In the 291 days between now and the municipal election, those cynical actors on the political right will continue to shout about crime and disorder. They’ll work to make people as scared as possible, all so they can sell voters the idea that they, and they alone, can fix it.

Every little crime story - every report of a car theft, story about violence, feature on a drug bust - will become fodder for their campaigns. Every event, as small as it might be, will be isolated, warped, and fed through their rage machine. Every person on the margins will be labeled a threat, every critical voice will face the wrath of their organization (and, speaking from experience, they’ll do their damnedest to silence those voices).

But the facts don’t lie. The crime wave they are warning against isn’t even a ripple. The dangerous threats they fixate on are really just people in need. And the solutions they offer haven’t ever, won’t now, and never will make people feel safer.

Crime isn’t out of control. But the city’s right-wing political machine will work their hardest to convince you it is. I can only hope that, if, for the moment, we’re abandoning facts in favour of feelings, then the voters of Hamilton will feel it necessary to reject the kind of fearmongering politics being peddled by right-wing politicians and the big, strong, manly dads they will inevitably back in this October’s election.

And then maybe, just maybe, we can get back to talking about facts.

1  _{“11% Crime Rise, Police Losses Prompt Meeting” Hamilton Spectator, August 18, 1967 (Spec archive - Paywalled).}

2  _{“Crime Rise Steady” Hamilton Spectator, August 21, 1967 (Spec archive - Paywalled).}

3  _{Barrie Williams. “Arms, Ammunition Seized In Raids On Area Homes” Hamilton Spectator, September 15, 1967 (Spec archive - Paywalled).}

4  _{"" “City Crime-fighting, Protection Bull Up To $4½ Million” Hamilton Spectator, December 8, 1967 (Spec archive - Paywalled).}

5  _{“Crime Wave Not Rising, Just Figures” Hamilton Spectator, February 22, 1968 (Spec archive - Paywalled).}

6  _{“Revamped Force Reverses Trend In Crime Growth” Hamilton Spectator, March 29, 1968 (Spec archive - Paywalled).}

7  _{Spec archive links - December 2, 1966 (Link) & (Link); September 30, 1968 (Link); December 2, 1968 (Link).}

8  _{Spec archive links - November 18, 1968 (Link); November 29, 1968 (Link); November 30, 1968 (Link).}

9  _{Spec archive links - October 11, 1935 (Link); November 27, 1935 (Link); December 5, 1935 (Link); December 31, 1935 (Link).}

10  _{Paul Legall. “Firebug hunt stepped up” Hamilton Spectator, December 31, 1993 (Spec archive - Paywalled).}

11  _{"" “War on crack led to crime drop” Hamilton Spectator, May 19, 2004 (Spec archive - Paywalled).}

12  _{Spec archive links - November 27, 1935 (Link); August 8, 1994 (Link); May 26, 2006 (Link).}

13  _{Nathan Bawaan. “Hamiltonians think crime is up in the city — but what do the statistics show?” Hamilton Spectator, January 5, 2026 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

14  _{Doyle, MC; F Bood; K Hellfeldt; L Frogner; N Golovchanova. “Beyond Fear of Crime: Exploring the True Worries of Older Adults in the Context of Fear of Crime and Vulnerability in Sweden.” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-025-09631-2.}

15  _{Nicole O’Reilly. “Eight stolen bicycles, bike rack recovered from Delta encampment” Hamilton Spectator, September 9, 2024 (Spec link - Paywalled); "" “Police find pieces of a long gun in the debris after tent fire at the Delta” Hamilton Spectator, November 4, 2024 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

16  _{Teviah Moro. “1,300 people without housing tallied in one-day snapshot of Hamilton homeless crisis” Hamilton Spectator, January 7, 2026 (Spec link - Free Access).}