I love the middle of July because that’s when the new crime statistics come out. Last year, Yorkton ranked 25th in crime severity index, 21st in violent crime severity index and 30th in non-violent crime severity index out of 305 jurisdictions with populations greater than 10,000.
That’s up a bit compared to last year, but still part of a downward trend from a peak in 2010 and 2011 when Yorkton had the seventh worst index in the country.
Of course, our mayor, Bob Maloney, doesn’t trust the statistics. Yorkton is a safe community, he says. He admits there are areas of town you probably don’t want to visit after midnight. He also notes that much of the violent crime is domestic or criminal-on-criminal. Not that those are not problems in and of themselves, but his point is there is not a lot of random violence.
That may be true, and these kinds of arguments are frequently made. Some people, not Bob and not me, will even go so far as to say, “who cares, let the gang bangers kill each other off.”
Generally speaking, I don’t disagree with Bob. Most of the time, I don’t feel unsafe in the city, but I also don’t visit those areas of town of which he speaks even in the daytime, much less after midnight.
It is likely the mayor of Russell, Ontario, a township with almost the same population as Yorkton, which ranks 299th out of 305, takes an opposite view of the statistics.
Other criticisms of crime statistics include the idea that rural people report more crime than urban people and that in general, most crime goes unreported.
I do not deny there can be issues with statistics, but even if the criticisms are true, statistics are like polls, given a big enough sample size, they are highly accurate most of the time. If all the police jurisdictions in Canada are not a big enough sample size, I don’t know what is.
It’s also like golf. You can complain about how the wind, or the rain, or the length of the rough, or the hardness of the greens is why your score is so high, but everybody else is playing under the same conditions.
All police services go by the same reporting rules and given there are nearly two million crime incidents reported across the country, I’d say even with the margin of error, the statistics give us a pretty good picture of what is going on.
There may even be some anomalies in the data. Maybe Yorkton RCMP is much more diligent at reporting crimes than the 304 other jurisdictions. Let’s randomly say our police report at a rate that is 50 per cent more efficient than any other jurisdiction. That is an outrageous assumption, but for the sake of argument, even that would only reduce our rank to somewhere around the low 50s.
The other thing that makes it really hard to dispute Yorkton’s place in the hierarchy in the order of things, are the regional and national trends.
If, for example, Saskatchewan had the lowest crime severity in the country and no other Saskatchewan cities came anywhere close to the Top 25, you could make a case there was something wrong with the Yorkton data.
That is not the case, however. Saskatchewan leads all provinces, and not by a little bit. The provincial index of 135.8 dwarfs the next highest, Manitoba, at 104.3 and is nearly double the national average.
Furthermore, North Battleford and Prince Albert are number one and two. Among the country’s census metropolitan areas (CMAs, cities over 100,000 population), Saskatoon and Regina are number one and two in the nation (33 and 35 overall).
We have seven cities in the Top 50 and, if I’m not mistaken that’s seven out of nine cities in the province.
The fact that Alberta is third provincially, further validates the local result. The prairies top all the regions of the country, except for the far north. A city east of the Manitoba-Ontario border does not appear on the list until number 51 (Truro, Nova Scotia).
So, to wrap up, Yorkton has the third worst crime severity index in the worst province in the second worst region in the country.
The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one.
We have a problem, Yorkton.
What are we going to do about it?
