Thank you very much. I would say that a collection of well-known journalists and police are more of a draw than sociologists or criminologists.
On behalf of the centre, I would like to first of all thank you very much for this invitation.
I will explain a bit about what we are. If you go to the window there, you will see our offices in the old Canadian Pacific building on the eighth floor. We are an international NGO, non-governmental organization, that was founded 15 years ago by the governments of Canada, Quebec, and France. Over the years we have accumulated eleven member governments, and they include Australia, South Africa, the State of Querétaro in Mexico, El Salvador, and we're negotiating with Brazil right now. We have a range of governments around the world.
We also have a network of organizations that form our board. These organizations are specifically interested in issues of community safety and crime, and public security around the world. It includes associations of cities: in Canada the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, in the U.S. the Commission of Mayors. It includes associations and organizations that work specifically on prevention issues on the ground: the National Council for the Prevention of Crime, in Washington, Crime Concern in Britain, and these kinds of organizations.
We have quite an extensive network in many regions, in Latin America and the Caribbean, in North America, Europe, Australia, and a large number of places in Africa. We are a little less networked in the Far East and in Arab-speaking countries, and these are some of the challenges we are hoping to meet.
The role of ICPC is to promote the notion of prevention as something that is just as important as good policing and legislation in any society. It has been based, in a sense, on looking at the success in France of the role of mayors in dealing with issues of riots and unrest in cities. Gil Bonnemaison was the head of a committee of mayors in the 1980s that was extremely successful in responding to the problems of hot summers in French cities, which are not the same for young people as they are for older ones who can sit in cafés.
That approach is about working across the board--“joined-up government”, as it's called in Britain--with everybody in the sector, not just the police, but environment sectors, housing, health, education, youth, and social services. I think the success of the model developed in France has inspired a number of countries, from New Zealand to South Africa, and many others.
Over the period since the 1980s, a real understanding has developed at the international level of the importance of working across the board, transversely rather than in individual silos, in terms of policing and security. This is called social development over there.
The mission of ICPC is to try to get a balance between the way we spend our money, the way we understand problems, and the way we work on the ground. I can come back to this later, but the way we understand what is happening around the world--and we're basing our knowledge on information drawn from many, many countries over a period of 15 years for our organization, but maybe 20 or 25 years of research on crime around the world--is that if you work together at the national, state, provincial, and local levels, and you work on building in prevention as well as balancing that with good policing and good legislation, then you have a much better chance of dealing with some of the root causes.
In relation to organized crime, I will say why it's tremendously important to us. And I apologize if you have the expectation that we are experts on organized crime; we are not.
What we are looking at is everyday crime, crime that affects people on the street and that includes the impacts of organized crime, whether it's in Surrey, Montreal, or any other part of Canada. So we're interested in what we can do at the local level, at the city level, to create safer communities and to prevent the problems that arise from youth gangs and street gangs.
The big issue is that there is a tendency to talk about organized crime and all of the specialized forces. Today I heard Julian Sher talking about this as an important approach. It is extremely important in the view of many other people that we have a balanced approach and that we work on all fronts.
Today I would like to give you some examples of projects in other countries. I'm sorry if you have heard of some of these from other witnesses, but I hope that the accumulation of information will result in a familiarity with the subject sufficient to ensure that we are all talking about the same kinds of things.
Organized crime is an extremely difficult thing to define. It's easy enough for us to say who belongs to the Hells Angels, but when it comes to street gangs it is not always easy to distinguish between those that are organized and those that are not.
The trafficking of art and antiquities is an active area at the moment. I was a conference recently on this topic. This is a world that is both legitimate and illegitimate, and it moves in and out in various ways. You cannot say art and antiquities theft is organized crime, because it's often people doing legal things that are a bit shady, some of which they know about, and some of which they don't. Money-laundering and many other things are happening in this field.
Organized crime is very attractive. It's easy to think we can do something strong to prevent it, but it's very difficult to pin it down. In this regard, I was interested in the testimony about the profit futures. It's important for us always to remember how difficult it is to define who we're talking about. If we go in only one direction, we will be pulling in people who shouldn't be involved.
At the international level, we now have norms and standards. There are transnational organized crime protocols and conventions, but there are also guidelines on crime prevention. Two sets of guidelines were adopted by ECOSOC, the most recent in 2002. These guidelines urge national governments, regional governments, and local governments to pay attention to organized crime and the links between it and ordinary street crime. This is where we can begin to make a difference in prevention.
These 2002 standards on crime prevention enjoin governments to work in this area, and they lay out certain things you can do in legislation, regulation, public education, money-laundering, attitudes towards human trafficking, and some of the other issues you have been talking about.
There's a sea change that's been happening at the international level. The UN's World Drug Report, 2009, which was published by UNODC in April of this year, is interesting because it's the first world drug report to urge governments to consider prevention rather than tougher legislation. It's the first report that talks about combining prevention treatment and repression. The good news from the world drug report is that the use of opiates, cocaine, and cannabis are down in the world's major markets, and that there have been many successful seizures of drugs around the world.
So for UNODC and for the world drug report, there was actually some good news coming out of the world of drugs, and attention is now being paid to the importance of looking at demand much more seriously in terms of prevention and treatment.
The other thing that I think is very interesting has been a series of reports produced again by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in Vienna, from the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. These have looked at the links between crime and development, crime and violence, and crime and guns. They've looked at various areas—Africa, the Caribbean, Central America—and I think these reports have been coming out since 2004, 2005, and 2006.
These are very interesting regional reports that look at the links between security and organized crime, international impacts on countries as well as what's happening in countries, and the need for us to pay much more attention to safety and security before we can begin to get any kind of development, whether it's about poverty or whether it's just general economic development in a country.
So again, there is a movement to look at prevention, and in a quite broad way in terms of what that means. It doesn't have to be something that is very soft or very ill-defined, because there are some very clear experiences.
I think you can also see in some of the countries in Central America—El Salvador and Nicaragua, for example—that they have been using mano dura, really tough responses to the very serious problems of pandillas and maras and gang violence and organized crime in those countries, and it has not worked. The governments themselves have recognized this—and it's the general consensus among the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, UNODC, the World Health Organization, and elsewhere—that these approaches have been counterproductive in terms of filling up institutions and prisons with a large number of people who are gang-related, tattooed all over their bodies, and are not really going to be changed by the experience of being imprisoned.
They are beginning to look at the seeds of entry into gangs and how they can begin to prevent children getting into gang-related activities. There are some very interesting reports produced by the Washington Office on Latin America and a number of other organizations, which look at community-based projects that target specifically young men already in gangs, young men at high risk of being involved and drawn further into organized armed violence, and ways in which they can be given alternative lifestyles.
I tend to be an optimistic person, in spite of everything that happens every day. I think there have been a number of shifts in understanding about how we work internationally and in terms of the way we work. The approach of ICPC, and the kinds of crime prevention we are looking at, is very much a methodology rather than telling people what to do. It's about working across the board with people. It's about leadership from mayors, leadership from government, and having a balanced approach that covers a number of areas.
Just to give you some examples of quite spectacular success, since we're talking about organized crime, in 1991 the city of Medellin had a rate of homicides of 381 for every 100,000 people. It was the highest in the world, and it was largely the result of pandillas and guerrillas and armed groups in the city of Medellin. The city had basically lost control of its district. That rate of homicides in 1991—381 per 100,000—was reduced to 29 per 100,000 by 2007. It's a really extraordinary reduction, which has been gradual all the way from 1991 down to 2007.
The city of Bogotá is another extraordinary example, less affected by organized crime and gangs, more affected by the growth of the city, which was uncontrolled, and a lot of poverty. It was also very much ripe for young kids becoming involved in gangs, even if they weren't controlled by organized crime. The city of Bogotá had an annual rate of 80 homicides per 100,000 people in 1993 and reduced it to 19 per 100,000 people by 2007. That's a very low rate.
These are two extraordinary examples. And Cali is another city in Colombia that has done the same.
Although Colombia still has a very high rate, and Medellin's murder rate is ranked very high internationally, what is absolutely clear from these examples in Colombia is that it's been the result of a concerted attempt by these cities, with support from international organizations, obviously, and some funding. In applying this across-the-board approach—and sometimes a public health approach, if you like—they have said that any kind of violence is a public health issue, and that they have to respond to it in all the ways they can. It's a matter of setting up a series of approaches that combine serious attention to the high-risk groups and some really serious work in the targeted areas where the worst problems are and working with the youth on the ground, bringing in the community on the ground, and working with the church leaders and anybody else people still have some respect for, and putting money into those areas by supporting education projects, supporting training for youth, and many of these kinds of things.
It's this combination of approaches that has worked in those cities. If they can do it there, then I think we have an enormous amount to learn from them. If there's one thing that ICPC and the movement that's looking at the importance of prevention have demonstrated, it's that we can learn an enormous amount from cities and countries in the south, which have much more serious problems than we do.
I know I'm almost out of my time, but I will just mention that much closer to us, in the Chicago area, they have used some wonderful guys called violence interrupters—ex-gang members, ex-prisoners—who have been working to interrupt conflict and retaliatory shooting and have reduced the gun- and gang-related homicides in Chicago by quite a substantial amount, something like 25% to 75% in the various areas of Chicago over a period of time. That same approach has been used in Boston and Baltimore, and it's spreading across some 11 cities in the U.S. You may well have heard about this approach. I think David Kennedy might have talked to you in the past about it. I'm not quite sure.
There are many other examples, in Brazil, and in the United Kingdom, in Bradford, where there was an approach to develop a network on the ground with Muslim leaders. That particular approach has been very successful in preventing riots from occurring in the city of Bradford after an event. I think it was after the shootings and killings from the terrorist attacks in London, so this approach has actually prevented other events from happening.
All of these are illustrations, and there are a number of others I can give you, that demonstrate the importance of putting in place a range of approaches targeting the areas and the groups most at risk, and really putting facilities and support into education and recreation and many of the alternatives young people can have to joining a gang.
Thank you.
