Findings

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Police service, crime and victimization

Since 1991, the crime rate recorded by the Saskatoon Police Service has been higher than that of all metropolitan areas in Canada. In 2001, with close to 13,000 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, it was higher than the Canadian average by over 5,000 crimes per 100,000 residents. [Full text]

Portrait of crime in 2001

This study explores 21,933 selected and geo-referenced incidents. The crime rate — the number of crimes per 100,000 residents, was nearly twice as high in Saskatoon (11,144) than it was in Canada as a whole (6,597). [Full text]

Spatial distribution of crime

Police-reported crime is not distributed randomly within the boundaries of the City of Saskatoon. The downtown area and the central neighbourhoods of Riversdale and Pleasant Hill, located on the west side of the South Saskatchewan River, accounted for large portions of all types of crime. [Full text]

Western and eastern areas

The preceding maps show that there are more crimes reported west of the South Saskatchewan River than east of it. This contrast between the east and west sides was previously observed by Kitchen (2006) and acknowledged by several community representatives (Wilkie and Berdahl, 2007). The situation is explained in part by the spatial distribution of the population at risk. Although the number of residents on either side of the river was about equal, the western sector included 26,000 more workers than the eastern sector. [Full text]

Neighbourhoods

The east/west discrepancies are still evident when neighbourhoods are compared. The ten neighbourhoods with the highest crime rates are all located west of the South Saskatchewan River. [Full text]

Characteristics of the dissemination areas

Several earlier studies revealed that certain neighbourhood characteristics are statistically associated with crime (Fitzgerald et al. 2004; Savoie et al. 2006; Wallace et al. 2006; Kitchen 2006; Andresen and Brantingham 2007; Savoie 2008). In this section, we examine the statistical association between crime rates for different types of crime and certain neighbourhood characteristics. [Full text]

Neighbourhood characteristics and crime

Within the context of this study, the six factors revealed by the factor analysis are regarded as the "atmosphere" that the residents and other users (people coming there to work, to shop, for example) of the neighbourhood experience. The statistical association between these environmental characteristics and crime rates is analysed below. [Full text]

Discussion and future directions

With more than one crime per ten residents, the City of Saskatoon had one of the highest crime rates in the country in 2001. The spatial analysis of these crimes revealed that they were heavily concentrated in the western part of the city. More specifically, over one-fifth of the crimes reported occurred in the Central business district or in the adjacent neighbourhoods of Pleasant Hill and Riversdale. In contrast, very few crimes were reported in outlying neighbourhoods. [Full text]