2009-04-21

Crime Severity Index Published

Police-reported Crime Severity Index published at Statistics Canada: "...a new tool that, for the first time, tracks changes in the severity of police-reported crime."

More on PRCSI here.

I like the tricky headlines at the CBC, Canada.com and CTV.ca: "Crime Severity drops over 10 year period and "Crime Severity Declines" Serious criminal offenses on decline" respectively.

It's true.

But this was a result in a 40% drop in break-ins.

Reading further, violent crime is holding steady:

"In contrast to the downward trend in the seriousness of police-reported crime as a whole, the index for just violent crime stayed relatively stable during the decade. This suggests that the situation with respect to serious crimes against the person was about the same as 10 years ago.

In 1998, the Violent Crime Severity Index value was 98.0 and in 2007, it was 96.5, a drop of about 2%. The traditional violent crime rate was also at about the same level in 2007 as in 1998."

And for cities:

"Among Canada's three largest census metropolitan areas, crime was less serious overall in Toronto in 2007 than in either Montréal or Vancouver.

Canada's largest metropolitan area, Toronto, had a Police-reported Crime Severity Index of 65.6 in 2007, well below the national average of 94.6 and the lowest of all 27 census metropolitan areas.

Montréal had an overall index of 94.3 while Vancouver's overall index was 128.5, well above the national average and sixth highest of all metropolitan areas.

On the other hand, Toronto's violent severity index was almost the same as the national average while the indexes for both Montréal and Vancouver were above. Vancouver's violent index was sixth highest of all the metropolitan areas."



3 comments:

  1. Paul Costopoulos4/21/2009

    The good news here is that despite all the media hype and the glamour it confers on the phenomenon that severa crimes and violent crimes have not augmented. That is a very good sign.
    Shmile Luigi.

    ReplyDelete
  2. If Luigi smiles any more he'll be in denial.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Paul Costopoulos4/21/2009

    I'm not asking that much

    ReplyDelete

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