It’s not what you want your community to be known for.
Using Statistics Canada crime data, Maclean’s has ranked Vernon as the ninth most dangerous community in the country.
The ranking is based on what Statistics Canada calls its Crime Severity Index.
“The crime rate is how we always traditionally measured crime. The crime rate is taking the total number of offenses and dividing it by the population,” Statistics Canada spokesperson Warren Silver explained.
“The downside to that is it didn’t really tell you, when crime was increasing, if it was bicycle thefts or if it was homicides…We developed this new system called the Crime Severity Index which takes into account the relative seriousness of crime to be able to tell us not just if crime is going up but if the seriousness of crime is going up.”
Silver said the increase in Vernon’s Crime Severity Index was driven by a 46 per cent increase in break and enters.
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“So although you did have a substantial increase in your crime severity it was what we would call non-violent,” Silver said.
In Vernon, when you look only at violent crime, the community drops from ninth to twenty-ninth in the country on the magazine’s most dangerous ranking.
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In a written statement the Vernon RCMP spokesperson said in smaller communities, like Vernon, a single crime can have a bigger impact on crime severity rankings than it would in a larger community.
She said property crime, which would include break and enters, spiked in early 2016, the year the rankings are based on. However, police were able to arrest a number of prolific offenders.
“In 2016, Vernon experienced a number of violent incidents, including three where a firearm was discharged. These incidents, which were linked to the drug trade, would significantly impact the city’s violent crime rating,” Cst. Kelly Brett said by email.
“The Vernon RCMP remains committed to developing crime reduction strategies that identify and target known prolific offenders, and we will continue to work with our partners and the community to reduce all types of crime in Vernon.”
Statistics Canada said it does “take population into account” in its calculation of the Crime Severity Index.
Other Okanagan communities were also high on the magazine’s “most dangerous” ranking. Penticton was sixtieth while Kelowna was ranked the thirty-fourth most dangerous community in Canada.
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