Young, male population influences crime rate: report

Why does Edmonton have some of the highest levels of crime in the country?

Blame all the young dudes. While it didn’t borrow the line from David Bowie, a report to the Edmonton Police Commission Thursday suggested that the city continues to score highly on crime rankings in part because of its high concentration of men in their prime crime-committing years.

“Demographics explain a lot of what’s going on behind crime rates,” said Coun. Scott McKeen, a member of the police commission. “We had, going back a couple years ago, a really young population of young men and women who had come to Edmonton for work, and it’s just the nature of the beast — that there’s a certain age population that just tends to get in a little more trouble.”

Edmonton consistently ranks among the top cities on the crime severity index, which measures the overall seriousness of crime as opposed to crime rates.

The report had previously been presented in 2016, but was recycled after a commissioner requested more information on the “socioeconomic factors” behind crime in Edmonton.

Police service researchers found that Edmonton has among the lowest median ages of any city in Canada, concentrated in the “atrisk crime age” bracket of 18 to 34.

In 2015, Edmonton had the highest ratio of men to women of any Canadian metropolitan area, with 1.03 males for every female. Among younger populations, that ratio grew to 1.07.

While those numbers have changed slightly since the original report, police Chief Rod Knecht said Edmonton’s population still trends young and male.

The report also considered the size of Edmonton’s Aboriginal identity population. Indigenous people are vastly overrepresented in the Alberta correctional system, accounting for around 40 per cent of admissions but just five per cent of the adult population at the time the report was written.

The report stressed that the reasons for this are “complex” and that “a deeper analysis is expected to find that it is the underlying socioeconomic vulnerabilities that Aboriginal persons are more subject to which is a better explanation of crime and victimization.”