By James Bowler

Violent crime rates drop in PA, but city moves up on crime severity index

Jul 24, 2014 | 6:15 AM

At a first glance at Statistics Canada’s most recent crime severity index numbers for Prince Albert, the fact the city rose one position in the rankings may stand out.

The crime severity index has Prince Albert at an index rating of the fifth-highest in the country for cities with populations over 10,000 in 2013.

However, Prince Albert Police Chief Troy Cooper said that is based on averages from other cities, and Prince Albert has actually seen decreased criminal activity, along with the rest of the country.

“Our overall crime severity in 2012 was I think, 203 roughly, and in 2013 it’s 192, so we’ve seen an improvement in the quality of life and safety,” said Cooper. “We had a decrease in violent crime rates, it’s just that some of the other centers on the list improved more than we improved.

“Our numbers are actually good news story, just not as good as maybe some of the other provinces such as Manitoba where they’ve seen major drops in some of their violent crimes.”

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Cooper added that they’ve already taken those numbers into account in January and have moved on to continue to bring crime rates down.

“These are old numbers to us,” said Cooper. “We discussed this back in January, we regroup and reallocate resources based on what we saw seven months ago.”

“This is just a different way of saying something that we’ve already talked about for quite a while.”

Cooper said that his focus is more local as Prince Albert is a busy city which sometimes requires a heavier amount of police attention.

“We know that we’re a busy police service for sure, but we’re in the busiest province in Canada,” said Cooper. “Saskatchewan has the highest crime rates in the nation and that’s just part of the policing universe and something that we’re aware of and something that’s a challenge for us every day.”

He added as well that a rise in crime rates does not necessarily mean crime has increased in the city, but it could mean that police are becoming more effective and making more arrests.

“If we go out and through proactive enforcement arrest more impaired drivers, we know that’s going to drive our stats up but we know that it’s the right thing to do and it’s something we’re going to continue to do,” said Cooper.

“We try to address root causes, for example if we lay a charge of cocaine trafficking or impaired driving, it impacts these statistics, but we do those sort things proactively because we know that there’s an impact in property crimes an impact in public safety for us to do it.”

He said that as long as the community is safer because of these proactive approaches, he’s not concerned with how it is perceived in the statistics.

“We’re not necessarily concerning ourselves with how the crimes are reported as much as we are with improving the quality of life and the safety of our community.” 

In the rankings for cities with populations of 100,000 or greater, Saskatoon was ranked number 2 and Regina number 1 in the country for severe crimes.

jbowler@panow.com

On Twitter: @princealbertnow