Statistics can be maddening at times.
Interpreting those stats isn’t always easy, and if you lack that ability to delve deeper behind the number, you might find yourself being jerked around by those spewing those figures.
Take percentages for example. You might here that there’s been a 200 per cent increase in a particular crime or a type of incident. But if that number represents an increase from five to 15 in a city the size of Estevan, it might not be a source for alarm.
The crime severity index is another one of those wonderfully weird statistics. It’s a complex number that takes the crimes that occur in a community, assigns them a weight based on the type of crime (a murder or a serious assault will be assigned more weight than a mischief complaint, for example), factors in a community’s population and creates a total score.
It’s a number that can be skewed. It tends to favour large metropolitan areas over smaller centres. A murder or another serious violent crime in a community the size of Estevan will have a greater impact on the crime severity index than a similar crime in, say, Vancouver.
So while the crime severity index is far from perfect, people should take note of the sliding figure in recent years.
At one time, Estevan was fairly high on the index ranking. It was in the top 25 in Canada in 2015, but fell out of the top 50 in 2016 and the top 100 in 2017. In 2006, the city’s index rating was at its lowest point since 2004.
People will cite a variety of factors for the city’s lower national ranking. One of them is the impact of the economic slowdown. Yes, there has been an increase in some types of crimes since the economy dropped off in 2014, but with fewer people in the city, and fewer transients, crime levels have gone down.
Of course, the index deals with reported crimes; there are a lot of crimes, some of which are serious, that aren’t reported each year.
Members of the Estevan Police Service also deserve credit for Estevan’s lower crime severity index.
While the Estevan RCMP didn’t see a staggering decrease in its ranking, thanks in large part to a fatal impaired driving-related increase in June 2017, it still saw a decrease as well, thanks in large part to the dedication of its members.
Some might think that a lower CSI might be proof for the need to cut back on local police spending, or even eliminate a couple of positions, a reduction in officers could result in higher crime rates again.
Ultimately, the true measure of a community’s safety is not in formulas or indexes or annual reports that stats-happy editors look forward to. It’s in the comfort level of its residents.
Do you feel safe going for a walk in your community after dark? Are you constantly looking over your shoulder?
There are common sense precautions that need to be taken, such as locking the doors of a vehicle or home when leaving it unattended, but we think most people in Estevan feel pretty safe.
They certainly feel safer than in big cities, and that’s more important than the crime severity index.
