Addressing poverty best way to reduce crime, majority of city residents say in survey

A majority of Winnipeggers believe tackling poverty is the best way to reduce crime, according to a new poll that also suggests support for addressing the root causes of crime has slipped over the past four years.

The survey, conducted by Abacus Data for the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg, found 56 per cent of residents favour increased spending on poverty reduction, compared with 22 per cent who believe spending more on police is the best solution.

Support for poverty reduction has fallen six percentage points since 2022, while the proportion favouring increased police spending has edged up three points.

“It’s encouraging… because I thought it would be much lower,” Kate Kehler, executive director of the council, said Friday at a safety and well-being seminar at St. John’s High School.

Kehler said calls for more police are partly driven by Winnipeg’s growing population and frustration among crime victims over slow police response times. But she argued there is little evidence that increasing the number of officers relative to the population reduces crime.

“We need less crime rather than more police. And the cost of the police budget is not sustainable, as it is.”

The Winnipeg Police Service budget is set at $370 million for 2026, an $18-million increase over the previous year.

Kehler doesn’t blame WPS Chief Gene Bowers for seeking additional resources, arguing that decisions about how public money is spent ultimately rest with elected officials.

“If I were the Winnipeg police chief, I would be doing all that I can to get all the money and resources that I could to do what I think is my role in providing community safety,” Kehler said. “But for politicians and our leadership, it’s their job to make the decisions based on what works and what doesn’t work.”

Kehler isn’t necessarily advocating cuts to the police budget. Rather, she said governments need to invest more in addressing poverty and other underlying causes of crime.

In 2023, Winnipeg Centre had the highest child and family poverty rates in Canada among federal urban ridings, with 42 per cent of children living in poverty.

“We are actually damaging our children,” Kehler said. “We know that even a short period of time spent in poverty can actually affect brain development. People can recover, but it’s not through resilience alone.”

The poll also revealed significant differences based on age and political affiliation.

Among respondents aged 18 to 34, 74 per cent favoured poverty reduction, compared with 56 per cent of those aged 35 to 54 and 42 per cent of residents 55 and older.

The political divide was wider, with 69 per cent of NDP voters identifying poverty reduction as the best approach, compared with 17 per cent of Progressive Conservative voters. Meanwhile, 57 per cent of PC voters favoured increased spending on police.

In its alternative municipal budget last month, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives proposed redirecting $34 million, or about 10 per cent, of the WPS budget toward outreach, poverty reduction, harm reduction and housing.

The proposal would reduce the WPS share of the city’s overall budget from 28 to 23 per cent, still well above the 15 per cent average in comparable Canadian municipalities, according to the centre.

Molly McCracken, director of the centre’s Manitoba office, said Winnipeg has lost approximately 150 community service positions over the past 25 years, alongside reduced hours at libraries and community centres.

“We’re just trying to remind people that we’ve lost a lot at the city and community services isn’t that big of a line item,” she said. “But it can have a huge impact, but not if we completely underfund it.”

The alternative budget also calls for higher property taxes, arguing decades of efforts to keep taxes low have come at the expense of municipal services and infrastructure. All three leading mayoral candidates have said they would raise property taxes, but haven’t given many details on where the additional dollars would be spent.

Meanwhile, one Winnipeg organization has developed its own alternative approach to community safety.

Mary Burton, executive director of Zoongizi Ode Inc., said the Indigenous youth organization began developing its community safety program in 2021.

“When we started this, we realized that police do not stop crime. They respond to it,” Burton said.

The organization developed a training program that goes beyond the standard 40 hours required for a security guard licence, providing another 130 hours of instruction in areas such as de-escalation and non-violent crisis intervention.

“We started out with three community safety hosts,” Burton said. “Now, we’re up to about 50, and we’re in libraries, access centres and now the Winnipeg School Division. All of our hosts have lived experience with homelessness, with poverty, with justice or the child welfare system. Because who better to help our relatives struggling in the street than someone who has been there?”

Abacus Data surveyed 600 Winnipeg adults between Aug. 28 and Sept. 14. Results were weighted to reflect the city’s population and have a reported margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

scott.billeck@winnipegfreepress.com