I love statistics so I always look forward to the end of July when StatsCan releases the previous year’s crime data.
I actually cut my teeth in this business on crime statistics. My first week working for the Interior News in Smithers, BC, my first newspaper job, my editor asked me to look into a recent rash of car thefts. It was a really minor story, but I stumbled on the provincial crime statistics for 2004 while I was looking into the auto thefts.
Lo, and behold, Smithers had the highest crime rate in the province, had had for three years running. That led to a five-part series entitled “Crime Capital of BC.”
The mayor, Jim Davidson, who died just recently was incensed.
The Chamber of Commerce was apoplectic.
The police were none-too-happy.
Hey, I didn’t make it up.
It did seem a little incongruent with the town, however. If you’ve never been, Smithers is a picturesque town with a Swiss Alps kind of flair nestled at the base of majestic Hudson Bay Mountain.
It doesn’t seem particularly dangerous.
The numbers do not lie, however. But they can be misleading. Smithers did have a lot of criminal incidents, more per capita than anywhere else in the province, but it was mostly really petty stuff.
Town officials also argued that because the town was a bit of a regional hub, the effective population was a lot larger than the official population so a lot of the crime was imported. That does not wash, or course, because the crime was still taking place in the town and pretty much every centre can make similar justifications.
Nevertheless, crime rate, the number of incidents per 100,000 population, is not really an effective way to measure the relative safety of cities. That is why, in 2009, StatsCan starting using the Crime Severity Index (CSI). This weighted methodology takes into account that all crime is not created equal; a homicide is more important than a break and enter.
As an aside, Smithers does not fare a lot better under the CSI than it did under the old crime rate.
The CSI is not perfect either because there are always factors that can slightly skew things. Although we think of all police departments behaving exactly the same, they really don’t. Take marijuana for example. Attitudes toward pot differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Even though the law is the same wherever you go, police officers treat it differently. In some places they will arrest you for having a seed in your pocket, other places they will turn a blind eye even if they see you smoking it.
By the way, don’t start sending me emails calling the newsroom to complain about me saying this. It is a fact.
There is also the simple possibility of human error. The statistics are based on “police-reported incidents.” Police officers are humans, humans make mistakes, ergo cops make mistakes.
That being said, aside from perhaps some minor discrepancies, the trends are inarguable. Among the important ones, crime rate, violent crime rate, crime severity and violent crime severity have all been declining across the country for some time.
Also, western Canada is much more uncivilized than the east.
The good news is that Yorkton, at least in recent years, is experiencing a more rapid decline in crime than other jurisdictions.
The bad news is that we are still 34th in crime severity and 58th in violent crime severity out of 303 cities in the country with more than 10,000 population.
It has been suggested by our mayor, Bob Maloney, that the city is safer than those stats make it seem because most of the violent crime is not random, but domestic.
I do not believe the mayor is saying that domestic violence is not as bad as random violence, merely that it is a different kind of problem, one that ultimately must be addressed both within and outside of the justice system.
In any event, it’s a good news story for Yorkton tempered only by the fact that we have a lot of work left ahead of us.
