Saskatoon gets lowest ever ranking on crime severity index

Saskatoon’s most recent ranking on Canada’s Crime Severity Index is the lowest the city has ever been.

Troy Cooper, chief of the Saskatoon Police Service, said he was pleased to see Saskatoon behind Regina at sixth on the index, the lowest ranking the city has seen since the crime measurement system was first rolled out in 1998.

“That doesn’t mean that we don’t have crime here, of course, it just means that when you compare us to some of the other centres, we’re trending in the right direction,” Cooper said, calling it a “good news story.”

Having just received the report, Cooper said the police service will spend the next few days reviewing it to see what lessons can be learned, and to ensure their resources are appropriately placed in the city.

The Crime Severity Index is just another way of reviewing crime statistics, according to Cooper. Other ways include raw numbers and victimization rates. Crime severity, he said, provides another perspective on how the community has been impacted by offending. In reviewing the report, Cooper said police will make sure they are seeing what they expected, and trends are as the police service anticipated.

“We want to make sure that the size of the solution fits the size of the problem,” he said.

Cooper also noted that the index is useful for determining the scope of crimes. For example, homicides increased nationally in 2021, and that is seen in Saskatchewan generally. Saskatoon, however, has seen a reduction in its homicide rate, according to the chief.

A national trend of increasing sexual crimes, though, is also true locally in Saskatoon. Cooper said there are several reasons for that, but Saskatoon police have been actively trying to reduce barriers to reporting which might account, in part, for the increase.

A civilian advisory panel is tasked with going through reports of sexual violations where no charges were laid to provide feedback on how Saskatoon police can better provide support to people who are reporting these types of crimes. The advisory panel’s suggestions are meant to help improve reporting rates.

Cooper said the 2021 trend of increasing property crime is continuing into 2022. Crimes like robbery fall into that category, the chief shared, and are usually attributable to an economic downturn.

The chief said a focus on violence against Indigenous people — who face a rate of violence double what non-Indigenous people do — is also worth highlighting.

“I think it’s important for us to be able to clean that data to be able to see the true picture, because it’s undoubtedly underreported as well,” Cooper said.

As part of that effort, Cooper said the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and Statistics Canada have agreed that more race-based data needs to be collected, something Cooper said is being worked towards on both local and national levels.

— With files from 650 CKOM’s Lara Fominoff.