City climbs to 11th in crime severity index
Prince George experienced the 11th highest amount of crime severity in the country during 2017, according to a Statistics Canada analysis released this week.
The ranking is a three-place climb from the year before as the city’s score rose by 13 per cent to 174.68.
Concurrently, the city was ranked 11th for violent crime, up from 16th in 2016, and 12th for non-violent, up from 15th in 2016.
The rankings apply to all communities with at least 10,000 people.
In terms of violent crime, 2017 got off to an inauspicious start, Prince George RCMP Supt. Warren Brown noted, with a double homicide.
Seaver Tye Miller, Aaron Ryan Moore, Joshua Steven West and Perry Andrew Charlie have each been charged with two counts each of firstdegree murder on the January shooting deaths of Thomas Burt Reed and David Laurin Franks. The accused remain in custody.
It didn’t end there.
In May, Roberta Marie Sims went missing and is believed to have been the victim of a homicide.
Also in May, Shane Whitford was stabbed to death and Christopher Clarke Prince is in custody on a count of second degree murder in that instance.
In August, a man whose name has not been released, was found dead in a vehicle on Noranda Road and in October, Lloyd Sword went missing and is presumed murdered.
For non-violent crime, a key driver appeared to have been a significant jump in property crime. At 6,573 incidents, there were 1,038 more reported than in 2016.
“I’m not making excuses, however resources were required to front-end load these (homicide) investigations for community safety and they take away other police presence on the roadways, so we weren’t able to target hotspots, prolific offenders and priority offenders as we have in the past,” Brown said.
Added to that, said Brown, was an influx of evacuees from the wildfires in the Cariboo, a number of whom have mental health and addiction issues. He also noted it can take just a few people to make a big impact.
“We have some criminals who I suspect steal upwards of 50 vehicles a year,” Brown said.
Brown said the amount of trouble this year is down significantly – there have been no homicides so far – and he will soon provide a more detailed update to city council on how 2018 has gone so far.
“At the end of the day, you don’t like to see your name beside some of the other cities that are always in your top 10 and we’re not far off that doorstep so yeah, that bothers me that we’re there and we’re going to use every effort that we have to get out of that hole this year,” Brown said.
To calculate the index, Statistics Canada takes the number of police-reported incidents for each offence and factors in the weight for that offence, based on the sentence typically handed out.
For example, the weighting for murder is about 1,000 times greater than for marijuana possession.
All weighted offences are then added together and divided by the corresponding population total.
Finally, the index is standardized to 100 using 2006 as a base year, to make interpre- tation easier.
The community-by-community rankings and scores are posted with this story at pgcitizen.ca.