Police-reported Information Hub
Geographic Crime Comparisons

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Additional information

This interactive dashboard allows users to compare high-level police-reported information across different geographies, including for Canada, by province and territory and by census metropolitan area. Users can select for one or more geographies to view incident-level statistics or Crime Severity Index information over the last 10 years and as year-over-year percentage changes.

Users can navigate the dashboard to get an overview of a particular geography or to compare geographies over time. Users can first select one or more geographies by using “CTRL+click” and clicking on geographies. They can also search for a specific geography in the text line. They can then select between Crime Severity Index or police-reported incident information and subsequent information types. When selecting police-reported incidents, users can also specify a specific violation of interest by clicking in the drop down or by searching in the text line. These selections can be modified at any time in order to change the visual elements present in the interactive tool.

Select the Home button to return to the Police-Reported Information Hub.

Note

The Crime Severity Index (CSI) and police-reported crime rate are area-based measures that summarize police-reported crime. The CSI was developed to complement the conventional crime rate and other indicators by considering both the number and severity of crimes in a given area. These measures are not indicators of overall safety and should be interpreted in the broader community context.

For additional contextual information within and outside the criminal justice system, see the following resources:

For detailed information at the police service level or for long-term trend data going back to 1998, see our online data tables. These data tables, and those referenced in the Data section also contain relevant contextual footnotes for data points, violations or geographies that are not available directly in the dashboard.

Definitions

See Definitions for detailed explanations of common concepts and terminology used in the analysis of police-reported crime information.

Criminal incident: Criminal incidents include all Criminal Code and other federal statute offences reported by police services. Incidents are categorized by the most serious violation in the incident.

Crime rate: The crime rate is the sum of all Criminal Code incidents reported by the police divided by the population. The crime rate excludes Criminal Code traffic violations and other federal statute violations, such as drug offences.

Crime Severity Index (CSI): The CSI takes into account the volume and the relative severity of crime. To calculate the police-reported CSI, each violation is assigned a weight. CSI weights are based on the violation’s incarceration rate and the average length of the prison sentence handed down by criminal courts. The more serious the average sentence, the higher the weight assigned to the offence, meaning that the more serious offences have a greater impact on the index. Unlike the traditional crime rate, all offences, including Criminal Code traffic violations and other federal statute violations, such as drug offences, are included in the CSI. To calculate the CSI, the weighted offences are summed then divided by the population. Like other indexes (e.g., Consumer Price Index), to allow for ease of comparison, the CSI is then standardized to a base year of “100” (for the CSI, the base year is 2006). All CSI values are relative to the Canada-level CSI for 2006. CSI values are available back to 1998. For more information on the CSI, see Crime and justice statistics.

Census metropolitan area (CMA) and census agglomeration (CA): A CMA or CA is formed by one or more adjacent municipalities centred on a population centre (known as the core). A CMA must have a total population of at least 100,000, of which 50,000 or more must live in the core. A CA must have a core population of at least 10,000. To be included in the CMA or CA, adjacent municipalities must have a high degree of integration with the core, as measured by commuting flows derived from census data. A CMA or CA may have more than one police service. It is important to note that while official police-reported data on crime from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey use Statistics Canada's standard Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) names, the boundaries for the policing-based CMAs do not always fully align with the standard CMA geographic units used for disseminating information about the Census of Population.

Related Information

Related surveys

Recent analytical releases

For any questions or data requests, please refer to the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics (CCJCSS) Client Services group:
statcan.ccjcss-ccsjsc.statcan@statcan.gc.ca

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