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Comment by _1tem | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile police in Canada won't do anything about your stolen car even when you show them it's right there in a rail/shipping yard in your city.

- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/stolen-truck-authorit...

- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-man-finds-stolen-truc...

> Andrew texted the officer a screenshot showing the precise location of the AirTag. As the officer approached the rail yard, Andrew's second AirTag started pinging at the same location, suggesting the Bluetooth signal emitted by the device had connected to the officer's smartphone. (The tracker relies on nearby GPS-enabled devices to determine its location.)

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Clearance rates for violent crimes are below 60% in Canada… and even literal stabbing victims often go without any sort of closure, in pretty much every major city across Canada.

And it’s been like that for some number of years without any sort of fundamental reform, or enormous police/prosecutor budget increases, in sight.

From that perspective it’s amazing any car thefts gets solved at all…

Just to complete the picture, violent crime in Canada is at historic lows and falling.

Percentage-wise or numbers-wise?

Also, some jurisdictions have been known to engage in a practice where criminals are charged with lesser crimes in order to make the violent crime numbers look good.

How much does theft coverage add to car insurance in Canada on average?

How is this relevant?

e.g. Whether there are 1000 stabbing victims per year, or 5000, a low clearance rate means there are still many victims that can only pound sand, without even a remote prospect of seeing any action taken.

It's very relevant. Prevention is the best cure. One set of statistics might paint a grim picture, but a different set might be far more encouraging (of course these could have been fudged but i'm taking op at his word), if violent crime is falling people are safer even if the police are doing a worse job and that's much more important. This runs deeper then that. It's a common theme for people to complain how everything is worse now and the gradual failure of institutions. Any positive news should be highlighted and celebrated.

I'm not saying to ignore the problems, but it's important to get a better perspective.

It means that violent crime is less and less of a problem. I don’t even understand the question.

An 95% clearance rate with 100 crimes leaves the same number of unresolved cases as a 0% clearance rate with 5 crimes. If you have fewer crimes you don't have to spend as much money prosecuting them to get the same results.

As long it’s more than single digit cases per year per city not getting cleared, it seems practically irrelevant to car theft recovery what the number is beyond that. Since police forces have finite staffing and budgets.

Anyone proposing extra resources to be spent or diverted to car thefts would not be taken seriously, if it’s clearly insufficient to even clear most violent cases.

This assumes no feedback loops such as those found in the real world. Like "criminal who doesn't get caught does more crime"

Looking at homicide, which is the most unbiased indicator (not much under/over-reporting), it was at historic lows in 2013, when the homicide rate was 1.45. It has been growing nearly every year since. The latest data I can find is for 2022, which has a 2.273 homicide rate. For reference, that is a little more than 4x the homicide rate of Italy, which is at 0.545, and a little more than 2x Bulgaria's 1.088 rate.

Sources:

https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Unfortunately, covid is proving to be a huge outlier, so ending in 2022 isn't that useful. This is the US, but the reactions to covid caused huge crime spikes, which are now retreating fast: https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/08/fbi-us-crime-rate...

So there aren't a lot of crimes, and the police still aren't able to solve them?

Are these numbers reliable? Or are people just not reporting them because police won’t do anything? Also, are you accounting for improvements in medical technology? E.g., as of 2013, the rates of murder + attempted murder were 50-60% higher than in 1962: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/crime-in-canada-falls-to...

>Are these numbers reliable?

For murders and serious violent crimes like stabbings and robber/assaults resulting in major injuries, or for serious thefts, in a country like Canada or the U.S. i'd believe the numbers are. Very few people in these countries, where perception of police as useful more or less exists, would fail to report such crimes.

On the other hand, just to showcase a counterpoint, in countries like the one I live in (Mexico) even violent crimes and major thefts often don't go reported simply because in many parts, police are considered so useless (or even sometimes collusive with criminals and thus counterporductive) that even for serious things, they're not contacted unless absolutely necessary.

Even with these tendencies however, you'd be surprised how often people do go through the formality of filing a report just in case it turns up a result, particularly for murders and kidnappings, where desperation obligates them.

And even if someone is caught, every day the headlines are like:

>Teen pleads guilty to role in deadly Etobicoke mass shooting, gets bail ahead of sentence

>Axe-wielding suspect out on bail within hours of Vancouver stranger attack

>Nearly half of 124 arrested by Ontario carjacking task force were on bail

>Clearance rates for violent crimes are below 60% in Canada

Unfortunately the clearance rate is similar in the US as well. This source is a bit outdated violent crimes had a 45% clearance rate in 2019: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

When the police don’t act, it’s because they’re being _incentivized_ to not act. Likely via kickbacks from the criminals themselves.

There should be automatic punishments and career censures when cops fail to leap at opportunities like the one you quoted.

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