‘Kelowna is not a national and provincial leader in crime rate’: RCMP Superintendent

Before the reports of Kelowna, B.C., being a crime capital circulate, the city’s top cop wants to offer some context.

While presenting a report to Kelowna city council,  Supt. Kara Triance said she’d like people to realize that Statistics Canada’s Crime Severity Index (CSI), which will come out later this year, offers insight into the year that passed, and it is in areas of property crime where the city sees the highest activity.

“Perhaps the key takeaway today is it’s important to educate and inform our citizens that the CSI is not Kelowna’s crime rate and Kelowna is not a national and provincial leader in crime rate, despite the fact that property crime remains a significant priority for our city,” she said.

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Triance said that the Central Okanagan is expecting a relatively status quo CSI score this year, with the city’s 2022 drivers continuing to be incidents of breaking and enter, theft, theft from motor vehicles, shoplifting and fraud.

“We know that shoplifting is up 20 per cent,” she said.

“We see break and enter businesses down almost 30 per cent.”

Triance wanted to draw attention to how the Crime Severity Index is calculated.

“I think it’s useful to understand what it is that we’re looking at … with those weights. Simply, every crime is given a score and those scores are based on the sentences that are handed out by judges.

“So as you see here, and the scores that are maybe not what you might expect in Kelowna, where property crime is the primary issue, it remains higher score than communities where violence and persons crimes are a key concern.

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“For example, the weight of a common assault is 26, however, for fraud the weight jumps to 121,” Triance said.

“(That means) judges are on average handing out longer sentences for fraud than they are for assault, so the CSI then takes a total and it divides that by the population, which as we’ve noticed does not take into account the shadow population.”

That “shadow population” is really important to consider in the Central Okanagan, she said.

“We welcome more than 2 million visitors a year. So if we were looking at that total reported incidents divided by our population,  not taking into consideration those 2 million tourists that we see annually… would definitely present a different set of data.”

Tourist numbers are not accounted for in other cities, either.

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While Triance emphasized the crime stats rating, she did acknowledge that property crime does have an impact on residents and our retail communities.

“That’s why you’re going to see us continue to remain committed to property crime for 2023 and focused on crime reduction strategies we talked about,” she said.

Annually released, the Crime Severity Index measures the severity of police-reported violations, including traffic offences, with serious crimes given more weight.