Alberta crime indexes higher, statistics show

Rising break and enter rates and possession of stolen property violations pushed Alberta’s crime and violent crime severity indexes higher as police-reported crime increased for the third consecutive year across the country in 2017, new Statistics Canada data released Monday shows.

Every territory and six provinces reported increases to their crime severity increases (CSI) between 2016 and 2017 with New Brunswick posting the largest increase of 11 per cent. Alberta and Ontario both saw five per cent increases.

This province’s 110.1 CSI ranks Alberta third among the provinces with only Manitoba (118.1) and Saskatchewan (140.5) with higher rates in 2017. The national CSI is 72.9.

Continuing a trend that stretches back to 2015, Edmonton’s CSI of 112.3 ranks the city second worst overall among census metropolitan areas with only Saskatoon (115.0) higher. Edmonton’s violent crime severity index reached 107.0 in 2017 placing it just behind Saskatoon (107.9) and slightly ahead of Regina (104.5).

Nationally, the violent crime index reached 80.3, a five per cent increase over 2016. More than half of the increase in the violent crime index was the result of the increases in police-reported sexual assault, homicide and robbery.

The three Prairie provinces accounted for almost 50 per cent of Canada’s rural crime in 2017.

Edmonton continued to have one of the top homicide rates (3.49 homicides per 100,000 population) in the country in 2017, ranked third behind Thunder Bay (5.80 homicides per 100,000 population) and Abbotsford-Mission (4.72 homicides per 100,000 population).

There were 49 homicides in Edmonton in 2017 compared to seven in Thunder Bay and nine in Abbotsford-Mission.

Nationally, this was the third consecutive increase in the CSI following an 11-year downward trend from 2003 to 2014. The CSI is a measure of police-reported crime that takes into account both the volume and severity of crime.