Addiction-fuelled crimes are boosting Calgary’s crime data
The government data agency Statistics Canada released its annual report of crime severity indexes and police-reported crime rates across the country for 2017, showing that Alberta’s crime severity index was up 4.9 per cent compared to 2016.
CALGARY—A recent upward trend in Calgary and Alberta’s crime severity score is due in part to drug addiction issues in the province, experts and police say.
“We’re continuing to see the impact related to crimes such as vehicle thefts, robberies and those kinds of offences,” said Doug King, justice studies professor at Mount Royal University.
He said those crimes are often attributable to drug-related issues like the opioid crisis. “As people need to feed their addictions, they turn to motor vehicle thefts.”
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King was responding to a Statistics Canada report released Monday that shows Calgary’s crime severity index score increased by 5.54 per cent from 2016 to 2017.
Calgary deputy police chief Paul Cook agreed with King.
“I believe that most of our acquisitive crime in Calgary is fuelled by the current environment we see around addictions and drugs,” Cook said, referencing the start of the province’s fentanyl addiction crisis in 2015.
That crisis has led to increases in crimes such as commercial robbery, street robbery, break-and-enter, auto theft and car prowling, he said.
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“They acquire goods to further or fuel that drug addiction,” Cook said.
The Statistics Canada data shows that Alberta’s crime severity index score (CSI) was up by 4.9 per cent last year, compared to 2016.
The CSI is “a measure of police-reported crime that takes into account both the volume and severity of crime,” Statistics Canada said in its release. The measurement includes “all Criminal Code violations including traffic, as well as drug violations and all federal statutes.”
Statistics Canada uses a score of 100 as a baseline for the measurement; 100 represented the national CSI score in 2006.
Calgary’s CSI measurement, which covers its census metropolitan area and includes surrounding communities such as Okotoks, Airdrie and Chestermere, jumped to 81.76 from 77.47, which is a 5.54 per cent increase.
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But that still puts Calgary below Alberta’s CSI, which was 110.09.
And the data appears to support Cook’s reference to 2015 as the start of the province’s opioid crisis: Over the past five years, Alberta’s CSI has risen each year, starting at 84.95 in 2013.
The score’s biggest jump happened in 2015; it went up by 19.13 per cent, to 103.67 from 87.02 in 2014.
In its report, Statistics Canada noted high rural crime rates “in Manitoba (42 per cent higher than the province’s urban crime rate), Alberta (38 per cent higher) and Saskatchewan (36 per cent higher).
“Almost half of crime in Canada’s rural areas occurred in these three provinces, which accounted for about a quarter of Canada’s population served by rural police services.”
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Alberta’s high rural crime rate was due largely to high rates of property crime, the data agency said.
That correlates with a trend Cook said he and his colleagues have noticed over the past two years. He called it a fluidity of offenders, meaning a person commits a crime in a rural area and moves into the Calgary area (or vice versa), which puts a strain on the city’s police resources and those of the RCMP.
That, in turn, drives up the reported crime numbers.
“Offenders today are not restricted to a geographical area,” Cook said.
