The last couple of weeks of June were not kind to Estevan when it came to crime.
There was a stabbing in the southwest end of the city. But there were also impaired driver arrests, a rash of vandalism incidents, drug busts and other incidents.
Outside of the city, there was a very unfortunate incident in which a four-year-old girl had to be rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital after inadvertently ingesting methamphetamine while at Woodlawn Regional Park’s Boundary Dam beach site.
There was also the rather creepy incident at a local restaurant in which a couple of men tried to have their photo taken with a young boy. While they owned up to the incident and weren’t charged, the incident didn’t pass the smell test with a lot of people.
All of these things happening within a span of about two weeks sent people flocking to social media and sounding the alarm bells about safety in the community.
But this community is likely safer now than it has been in some time.
Each year, Statistics Canada releases the crime severity index (CSI). It’s a complex, convoluted system that assigns weight to different types of crimes, and calculates a severity rate based on a population of 100,000 people.
It is a system that tends to be hard on smaller cities. North Battleford has led the CSI for several years. Thompson, Man., used to lead the way. Other Prairie communities like Prince Albert and Yorkton have rated highly in the past.
It doesn’t take many serious, violent crimes to inflate the CSI ranking of a small city.
Estevan used to be one of the worst cities in the province when it comes to the CSI. But our ratings for 2016 and 2017 were among the lowest since Stats. Can started tracking the data; in fact, Estevan had the biggest drop in the country from 2012 to 2017.
We’ll get our CSI information for 2018 in a few weeks, but given the numbers that we saw last year, Estevan will likely be fairly low once again.
The CSI isn’t perfect. It doesn’t place much of an emphasis on impaired driving, theft, mischief or drug possession, crimes that Estevan continues to fight in an effort to get those numbers lower.
And in the end, a community is only as safe as the feeling of the average citizen. Does that person feel safe when walking around at night? Or are they worried about getting mugged?
Estevan’s CSI rating might be higher than most large cities, but people feel safer here than in Toronto or Montreal, where gangs and street crime are more prevalent.
Ultimately we should feel safe. We just had a series of high-profile and dangerous incidents in late June in and around the city. But those aren’t everyday occurrences in this community.
It’s just bizarre to have several of them happen in a short period of time. We might not have another stretch like that again for some time.
We have good police officers with the Estevan Police Service and the Estevan RCMP. Rural detachments have good RCMP officers as well.
But there will always be crime. And it will be incumbent on us to take the necessary steps to prevent crime, by locking doors to homes and vehicles when leaving them unattended.
People in southeast Saskatchewan should feel safe when walking around their communities at night, regardless of whether it’s a community of 100 people or 12,000 people.
