Boyle and Athabasca crime indexes higher than province, but not cause for panic

ATHABASCA COUNTY – Analysing crime in small communities can be tough — percentages don’t work well and while a flat crime rate tells how often laws get broken, it won’t show the difference between someone spray-painting a building or burning it to the ground.

To help address this problem, Statistics Canada developed the Crime Severity Index (CSI), a tool that weights how serious a crime is and averages it out into a — somewhat — easy to understand number.

“Under the traditional crime rate, you could have five bicycle thefts or five homicides, and they would both show as (the same increase),” said Warren Silver, the National Training Officer for the Policing Services Program at the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics.

“The CSI tells us much more about how many crimes are happening, but it also tells us how severe they are.”

According to Statistics Canada, crimes are assigned a weight based on their seriousness (determined by the actual sentences handed down by the courts in all provinces and territories). The current CSI uses the year 2006 as the base level of 100 in base year 2006, with increases moving that number up, and decreases moving it down. In 2023, Canada had a CSI of 80.45, and Alberta’s was at 103.

Comparatively, the Athabasca RCMP detachment had an index of 178.75, and Boyle’s was 184.71. According to Silver, the larger numbers isn’t a cause for panic — rural crime carries different trends than urban crime, and high-volume crimes including assault, mischief, firearms offences and impaired driving are more common once cities get left behind.

Despite the higher CSI score, rural residents are more likely to live in areas with lower crime rates, which suggests the higher score is indicative of hotspot communities.

“Areas with smaller populations may be more likely to be impacted by changes in the volume of crime over time,” said Silver, using Boyle as an example. In 2020, Boyle’s violent crime index rose by 21 per cent, only to fall by 24 per cent in 2021, another 13 in 2022, and 28 per cent in 2023, when the score was less than half what it was four years prior.

The CSI is particularly susceptible fluctuation from violent crimes in low population centres. According to Silver, one murder has the same impact as 7,000 shoplifting charges.

“There might only be one murder that happens every four or five years, so you’re going to see these huge anomalies, with a huge increase or decrease,” said Silver.

Boyle is particularly susceptible to large swings — the 2023 CSI is based on 475 incidents, compared to Athabasca’s 1,251, and 394,000 across the entire province.

Boyle’s 2023 rating went up a miniscule amount, rising less than one per cent from 2022, but the numbers show crime has been on the decline its five-year peak in 2020. That year, the CSI was 238, before falling to 197 and 183 in the next two years.

2023 was also the least violent year in the last five; 2020 was the five year high, with a rating of 318, but by last year it had fallen down to 150.

Boyle’s RCMP sergeant Dennis Properzi said the stats lined up with what his officers were dealing with on the ground, and he attributed this year’s crime decrease to successful charges laid against prolific offenders.

“Some of the guys that were the worst of our worse, the roughest of our guys here, they’re incarcerated for sure,” said Properzi. “We’re looking at people that will be getting three years or more, and they’ve been sitting in jail for months.”