How a Sask. city changed the way the Crime Severity Index is reported

A small city in Saskatchewan has helped affect big changes in the way Statistics Canada reports its annual Crime Severity Index (CSI) data.

After years of topping the rankings, the City of North Battleford got together with 10 other similar-sized communities from the four western Canadian provinces this past winter at a conference in Saskatoon to mitigate the unintended negative consequences of the crime severity index, which was reflected when the numbers were released Thursday.

"I think the intention was good to have another metric to look at the trend of crime in your community," North Battleford Mayor David Gillan said.

"I don't think it was ever the intention to say, well, how does North Battleford compare to Toronto?"

The federal government describes the police-reported Crime Severity Index (CSI) as a summary measure of the volume and severity of police-reported crime in an area—a city, a province or territory, or the country. Statistics Canada uses weighted data -- for example, a murder has 280 times the impact of a property theft -- to calculate a value assigned to each community.

Each year, data is published in two categories -- communities with populations of 10,000 and 100,000 or more.

Scholars, police, and Statistics Canada representatives joined in last winter's conference and ultimately agreed not to rank the cities according to the number and also agreed to add multiple disclaimers and explanations of the data and how it's not a "universal indicator of community safety."

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As media organizations would publish the ranking system with little context or explanation, Gillan said a city like North Battleford, with a population of roughly 15,000, would be painted as a community with the worst crime in Canada when that may not be an accurate depiction.

"We can't attract doctors and dentists and teachers and pipe fitters," he said. "Because people immediately look online and they see, 'Oh, you're number one in this index.'"

Gillan said one of the guests at the conference labelled the cycle the smaller communities found themselves in as a "negative loop."

"Whatever you try to do positively, once a year, you'll go back into a negative loop where basically whatever progress you've made the last year, you're basically going back to square zero when the Crime Severity Index comes out and ranks your community at the top," Gillan said.

Other communities highlighted the harm and hatred towards Indigenous communities in the area when crime would increase in any given year.

"A lot of the finger-pointing goes to our Indigenous residents and our Indigenous neighbours," he said.

"And we don't need that kind of divisive behavior inside our city because we're trying to grow our city. We're trying to be unified."

Saskatoon police chief Cam McBride said the crime severity index helps guide the force as another tool to learn more about crime trends and police response, but none of it comes as a surprise.

"We see some good news, and we see a challenge before us," McBride said. "The most important piece of data for me is how we fare year by year."

His biggest concern is the rise in violent crime reported in the metropolitan area compared to 2022. Last year, violent crime rose by roughly seven per cent. This year, violent crime has risen another 10 per cent as the city is on track to break its record number of 16 homicides in one year set in 2019.

So far in 2024, there have been 11 homicides in Saskatoon.

"The story is there seems to be increasing violent crime," McBride said. "That is a great concern to me and to us as a community. And so how do we work together to address that trend and turn it around?"

Gillan isn't hiding from the data. The 2023 Crime Severity Index Data for North Battleford shows an overall increase of 6.58 per cent compared to 2022.

As work continues to curb crime in the area, Gillan is happy to talk about crime trends and not the label of being the "crime capital of Canada" now that the ranking system is gone.

"It's not like it's not solving a crime problem," Gillan said. "It's solving the image problem, and the image problem will help us solve the crime problem."