By Ragnar Haagen

PA has fifth highest crime severity in Canada

Jul 24, 2012 | 3:34 PM

Prince Albert has just been listed as one of the top five cities in Canada. Unfortunately, it’s not something to be proud of because the issue is crime.

Statistics Canada released its 2011 crime stats today that showed amongst 239 police services in communities with populations over 10,000, Prince Albert ranks fifth overall on its Crime Severity Index (CSI) behind North Battleford, Thompson, Man., Yellowknife, N.W.T. and Powell River, B.C..

Prince Albert also came in second overall when it comes to violent crime and sixth overall in non-violent crime.

“With regards to the violent crime index we believe that (the numbers) are skewed,” said Sgt. Jason Stonechild with the Prince Albert Police Service on Tuesday.

“It is still a small population, around 36,000 people, so if you get 10 minor robberies, that will change where you are statistically.”

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Statistics Canada’s CSI tracks overall crime, violent crime and non-violent crime. It reflects the seriousness of individual offences and tracks changes in crime severity against a community’s population. One way it does this is by taking into account the relative seriousness of individual offences.

Each crime is assigned a weight depending on its seriousness, where more serious crimes have more of an impact.
The weighting comes from actual sentences handed down by courts in all provinces and territories. For example, murder has a value on the index of 7,042, robbery 583, and breaking and entering 187.

That is where Sgt. Stonechild believes there is a problem with how the numbers break down.

“We believe that the violent crime stats, as reflected in that report, are inaccurate for Prince Albert,” he said.

“The reason is that robberies, for the amount of value they put onto robberies, it doesn’t take into consideration the level of severity of robberies. When they put that down, the concept was individuals who run into stores with weapons and masks, that’s very serious … but because of our demographics here we have a lot of youth crime.”

Stonechild went on to say in Prince Albert, there are a lot of kids who have their bikes stolen, and that is also classified as a robbery. That is why he said he believes the crime severity index for Prince Albert is so high.

The overall numbers across the three indexes do not change much from last year when Prince Albert was ranked fourth overall in the nation, including third in violent crime and seventh in non-violent crime.

rhaagen@panow.com