Notes

^1.

Gannon, M. and K. Mihorean. 2005. "Criminal victimization in Canada, 2004."Juristat. Vol. 25, no. 7. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 85-002. Ottawa.

^2.

The Working Group consists of members from the following organizations: Statistics Canada, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ontario Provincial Police, Sûreté du Québec, Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, Toronto Police Service, Ottawa Police Service, Winnipeg Police Service, Victoria Police Service, Saint John Police Service, Justice Canada, New Brunswick Department of Public Safety, Quebec Ministry of Public Security, Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, Alberta Department of Justice, University of Ottawa, University of Waterloo and University of Manitoba.

^3.

For further information on these surveys refer to the data sources in Appendix A.

^4.

For more information on the calculation of the Crime Severity Index and its weights, refer to the Crime Severity Index Methodological Paper which is forthcoming.

^5.

For certain rare or new violations, courts sentencing data are not available. In these cases, a proxy weight is used which is calculated from similar offence types with the same maximum penalty in the Criminal Code.

^6.

To calculate the average sentence length, an outlier treatment method is used to remove a small number of extreme and highly influential sentences which may be due to unique court cases or data quality issues.

^7.

The Crime Severity Index is calculated using Incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey data. For the period from 1998 to 2007 Incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey data are not available for all respondents. In order to report this level of detail for police services still reporting to the aggregate Uniform Crime Reporting Survey over this time, a process of imputation was applied to derive counts for violations that do not exist on their own in the aggregate survey. For approximately 80% of the aggregate offence codes, there is a 1:1 mapping with a new Incident-based violation code. For violations where this was not the case, such as the aggregate 'other'Criminal Code category, it was necessary to estimate (impute) this figure using the distribution of 'other'Criminal Code offences from existing Incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey respondents.

^8.

The definition of violent crimes has been expanded to include some offences which were not included in the past. This change is detailed in Appendix C of this report.

^9.

A census metropolitan area is defined as one or more adjacent municipalities centred on a large urban area (known as the urban core). A census metropolitan area must have a total population of at least 100,000 of which 50,000 or more must live in the urban core.

^10.

Coverage of the Incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey in the years prior to 1998 was limited, making it impossible to calculate the Crime Severity Index before this year.