Prince George is Not (and never was) Canada’s Most Dangerous City: Using Police-Recorded Data for Comparison of Volume and Seriousness of Crimes

This article is based on the idea that crime should be analyzed in terms of both volume and seriousness. Crime rates are the most usual measure of the volume of criminality at a given time or a given place. Statistics Canada recently developed a Crime Severity Index to account for variations in the seriousness of police-recorded criminal infractions. A close look at its construction reveals that the Index is a weighted rate influenced by both the volume and the seriousness of recorded infractions. This article introduces a new indicator designed to measure the seriousness of recorded infractions. The measure is based on simple calculations and easy to interpret. It suggests that serious crime has decreased since the 1980s. It also suggests that city and province rankings based solely on crime rates are misleading because high levels of crime do not necessarily indicate high levels of the more serious crimes.