Crime severity’ declines according to new index

Crime is less severe in Canada than it was a decade ago but the seriousness of violent crime is holding steady, according to a new report from Statistics Canada.

The report is based on the "crime severity index," a new way for StatsCan to measure changes in the seriousness of crime over time and in different areas of the country. The agency’s traditional measure of crime, the "police-reported crime rate," measures changes in the volume of crime and counts each incident equally, regardless of whether it’s an act of mischief or a homicide.

The new crime severity index, on the other hand, assigns each type of offence a different "weight" based on how many people charged with a given crime are sentenced to prison time and the average length of prison sentence. As a result, changes in the most serious crimes have the greatest impact on the index.

Crime severity is expressed as an index for which 2006 is the base year and assigned a value of 100. In 2007, the most recent year for which information is available, the severity index for overall crime was 94.6, down from 119.1 in 1998. That translates to a 20 per cent drop in the severity of crime throughout that decade, driven in large part by a 40 per cent decline in break-ins, StatsCan says.

The agency also separates out crimes against the person, such as homicide, robberies and sexual assault, to obtain an index of violence crime. In contrast to the declining overall crime severity index, the violent crime index held steady over the last decade, the report says, dropping only about two per cent between 1998 and 2007.

Police-reported crime rates generally show a higher volume of crime in the west and northern regions of the country, StatsCan says, and crime severity reflects the same trends.

Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia experience more serious crime than the rest of the country, the index shows, while Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick have the least serious crime.

Overall, crime severity fell in every province between 1998 and 2007, the agency says, but Ontario and Quebec saw the biggest declines.

StatsCan will continue to report yearly on the police-reported crime rate, but says the crime severity index offers a new way to measure the seriousness of crime in Canada.