No need to fret: Crime stats don’t tell the true story

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on November 10, 2018.

Medicine Hat ranked 32 out of 237 municipalities in Maclean’s recent rankings of the “most dangerous places” in Canada.

On the surface, this is quite alarming, but ranking high on the list doesn’t necessarily mean there’s more crime, just that more incidents are being reported and prosecuted.

According to Medicine Hat Police Service Insp. Tim McGough, this is exactly why the city ranks so high on the index.

The MHPS has a “no call too small” policy, which leads them to investigate and charge people with crimes that he says might go unexamined elsewhere.

Stepped up enforcement against methamphetamine explains why the Hat has an 80.56 out of 100,000 rate in the “other controlled drugs” category, while the national rating is 23.41.

Of course, Medicine Hat’s population is below 100,000, but that figure provides a useful means by which to compare smaller municipalities like ours to big city centres, such as Calgary or Toronto.

The same is true of the fraud rate — our 475.63 is much greater than the federal rate of 299.05. Although the entire country is dealing with scams that purport to come from the Canada Revenue Agency, Hatters trust their police enough to report the scammers.

And our relatively high sexual assault rate — 96.06 compared with the national rating of 56.56 — is attributed to MHPS’s “trauma-informed approach,” which treats sexual assault survivors with the appropriate level of sensitivity.

Our youth crime rate, which at 77.46 is almost five times higher than the Canada-wide rate of 16.74, is misleading.

According to McGough, police in Alberta check on a small amount of “prolific” young offenders, who, if necessary, are charged with breaches of probation.

In British Columbia, for example, these breaches are dealt with by probation officers, not the police, so that would skew that province’s youth crime rate downwards and ours upward.

The increase in the Crime Severity Index on which the rankings are based — ours is 92 compared with 90.96 in 2012 — is somewhat convoluted.

Unlike the crime rate, which treats all crimes, however petty, as equivalent, the CSI weights crimes based on two factors of severity — the proportion of people who are incarcerated for the crime and the average length of their sentence.

In theory, this provides a more accurate reading of crime’s severity than the rate, but is difficult to break down unless one is a statistician and the magazine doesn’t tell you how each is weighted.

Another issue is that the ranking for each individual category of crime only tells the reader whether it’s up or down from the previous year, not by how much, which also complicates analysis.

The truly dangerous municipalities are the ones where people are afraid to contact the cops, which is, of course, difficult to gauge, unlike statistics of reported crimes.

So need to fret, Hatters. Although the Maclean’s rankings are interesting, they don’t necessarily provide a complete picture.

According to a poll in Tuesday’s News, 75 per cent of Hatters feel safe in their city.

Surely that counts for something.