Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. First of all, thank you for being here today. We will carefully note all the suggestions you have made. Some of them are certainly very interesting.
Mr. Hanson and Mr. Kohlhauser, you both raised an issue that interests me. Any time you have to talk to the public as representatives of police forces, people always give you statistics. Statistics will indicate if crime rates have gone down, for instance. Everyone is against you. People say you are too strict, even though on the ground, you realize you need to be even stricter.
Consider the example raised by Terry Kohlhauser. We are also interested in that example. When someone commits a homicide and the body is found, it is considered a homicide in Canadian statistics. When someone goes missing and is never found, that case is not included in the statistics.
We checked and noted that 41% of missing persons are found; 59% are never seen again. These people are young girls and young boys, men and women who go missing and whose cases are not included in statistics. Perhaps they were killed by criminal organizations, which have become so intelligent that now they hide the body after killing someone. The bodies are not found, and this gives the impression that homicide rates are going down. However, when we look at at-risk populations, as Mr. Kohlhauser mentioned—prostitutes or poor people—we see that these groups are being killed and not included in the statistics because their bodies are not found. They are missing persons.
I know there has been an increase. But how do you see this increase on the ground? I wonder if you have your own statistics. The statistics we get from Statistics Canada are not always effective enough to help us.