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Crime Severity Index is up for Weyburn

The Crime Severity index (CSI) for the City of Weyburn saw an increase in non-violent categories and a decrease for violent crime, resulting in overall increases in the local Crime Severity Index.
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The Crime Severity index (CSI) for the City of Weyburn saw an increase in non-violent categories and a decrease for violent crime, resulting in overall increases in the local Crime Severity Index.

The Crime Severity Index for Weyburn realized an overall increase of 20.6 per cent. In 2017, the CSI measured 94.77, as compared to 74.16 in 2016. As a comparison, the Crime Severity average for Canada is 72.87 per cent.

In the Crime Severity Index, violent crime realized a decrease of 2.49 per cent, and non- violent crime saw an increase of 27.82 per cent in Weyburn.

“Our biggest increase was in property crime,” said Weyburn police chief Marlo Pritchard, who noted a lot of thefts were crimes of opportunity from vehicles. The increase in property crimes also included break-and-enters and mischief.

Chief Pritchard pointed out the police department has an excellent clearance rate, which means many of the reported crimes are being solved with people being charged and convicted in court.

“We are holding people to account,” said the chief. “Weyburn is still a safe community. That’s the key focus, and we will continue to do our best to keep it that way.”

Crime Severity is but one measure used to track changes in police reported crime. The statistics were released by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (CCJS) in their report on Police Reported Crime Statistics in Canada, 2017.

This report presents findings from the 2017 Uniform Crime Reporting Survey and examines trends in the volume and severity of police reported crime at national, provincial and municipal levels.

Crime severity is calculated using sentencing data from the courts and each offence is “weighted” according to the severity of the sentences handed down by judges. The weighted offences are then multiplied by the number of incidents and then divided by the population. The Crime Severity Index uses the base year of 2006 as a standardized ‘100’ nationally to facilitate comparisons.