City crime rate up
Prince George had nearly double the crime rate and Prince George RCMP officers are handling roughly 50 per cent heavier caseloads than police officers in similar-sized B.C. communities, according to a report to city council Monday.
Prince George RCMP generated 50,182 case files in 2021, up 6.93 per cent from 2020, Supt. Shaun Wright said. In addition to providing local statistics, he provided a comparison between Prince George and three similar-sized B.C. communities: Kelowna, Kamloops and Nanaimo.
“(This) gives you an idea of what we’re dealing with here. Prince George has the lowest population… and is the highest in Criminal Code offences,” Wright said. “You can see by our case load per member, we’re really stretched…”
Drawing on 2020 crime data reported in September 2021 by the B.C. Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, Prince George’s crime rate was 209.1 Criminal Code of Canada offences per 1,000 population – compared with 111 in Nanaimo, 114 in Kelowna and 116 per 1,000 people in Kamloops. The provincial average crime rate is 76 offences per 1,000 population.
Police officers in Nanaimo, Kelowna and Kamloops carried an average caseload of 76 to 82 cases, compared to 121 in Prince George. On average across both municipal police forces and RCMP forces in the province, the average caseload per officer in the province is 53, Wright wrote in his report.
The Crime Severity Index, a weighted crime rate developed by Statistics Canada, for Prince George in 2020 was 223, compared to 130 in Kelowna, 123 in Kamloops and 112 in Nanaimo.
Statistics Canada has a complex formula for calculating the index, so that it “gives a better idea of what is happening on the ground,” Wright said.
A shoplifting and a homicide are both a single Criminal Code of Canada offence, but they are not equal in seriousness or in the amount of police resources to investigate them.
“We’re about 80 per cent higher than our comparator communities,” he said.
The number of case files in the city has been trending upward over the past four years – 44,118 in 2018, 48,022 in 2019, 46,927 in 2020 and 50,182 in 2021, according to the report.
Calls for service have been increasing steadily in the downtown area, Wright added. In 2018, the RCMP received 5,623 calls for service downtown. By 2021, that had increased to 7,691.
“Encampment was a big issue this year. It occupied a significant amount of our downtown resources,” Wright said.
Most of the crime downtown is minor, he said - mischief, causing a disturbance, suspicious people and being intoxicated in a public place were the most common.
The RCMP is increasingly being asked to take on jobs outside of their core policing responsibility, Wright said, something he and his leadership team are looking to address this year.
“We don’t need to be doing the job of other agencies. We become the default social service after 4 p.m., and after Friday until Monday,” he said. “Over the years, because we’re the 24-hour service, we’ve acquiesced and taken these things on. We don’t have time to be doing other people’s work, we barely have time to do our own.”