Ottawa/Chilliwack – It is a list that Stats Canada puts out every year.
The police-reported Crime Severity Index (CSI) is a summary measure of the volume and severity of police-reported crime in an area—a city, a province or territory, or the country.
However, the CSI is not intended to be used in isolation and is not a universal indicator of community safety. This paper highlights the origins of the CSI and the importance of interpreting the Index in conjunction with other data sources to better understand crime in a given area.
Statistics Canada says non-violent crime had a significant effect on the decline in the overall crime severity index in 2024. An actual drop of 4 percent.
To calculate the CSI, each type of crime is assigned a weight that represents its relative severity. Then, the number of police-reported incidents for a given type of crime is multiplied by the crime’s weight. Assigned weights are based on standardized information from court sentencing data over the previous five years.Footnote 4
Crimes that are more likely to result in prison time and longer sentences are given a higher weight.
For example: Using the conventional crime rate, one property theft has the same impact on the crime rate as one murder. One incident of murder is therefore equivalent in weight to one incident of property theft.
However, in the Crime Severity Index, murder has a weight of over 8,200, while property theft has a weight of 29.Footnote 5 As such, the impact of one murder on the CSI is approximately 280 times greater than one property theft.
Chilliwack led the list of 2024 followed by Kamloops, Winnipeg and then Abbotsford-Mission.
The detailed report from Statistics Canada is here.
The Crime Severity Index (CSI) was developed in 2009 as a complementary measure to the conventional crime rate and self-reported victimization data.Footnote 2 It represented the first major change in how Statistics Canada looked at police-reported information in nearly 50 years.
The CSI is intended to be one of many sources of information that can be used to better understand the evolving nature of crime in Canada.
