Crime Severity Index webinar - Transcript
Introduction
Speaker 1
I would like to thank the traditional territories of the First Nations People, Métis and Inuit across the country. I am joining you today from the traditional territories of the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe peoples whose presence here continues to this day. I would also like to acknowledge the land that I am on is at the meeting place of two treaties, the lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit and those of the First Nations of the Williams Treaty.
I would like to thank them and their Indigenous peoples for sharing this land with me. I'm honoured to be on this beautiful territory. Before we begin today's webinar, I invite you to take a moment to privately acknowledge the territory on which you find yourself.
Your presenter today will be Gregory Moreau, an analyst from the Canadian Center for Justice and Community Safety Statistics here at Statistics Canada. Today's session will be in English and last approximately 30 to 45 minutes. Closed captioning will be enabled through the built-in function of Microsoft Teams. So, to turn on the live captions, please go to your meeting controls.
Select more options and click turn on Live Captions. We had sent you a copy of the presentation yesterday, but if for some reason you did not receive it, please follow up with us and we would be happy to resend it to you. Should you have any questions of a technical nature during the presentation, please feel free to use the chat.
Please stay on the line at the end of the session as we will conduct a quick poll with only five questions to help us improve our webinar program. However, if you do not have any further questions, please go to the Statistics Canada website, and click on Contact Us to email or call, and a representative will follow up with your questions in a timely manner.
Okay, so without further ado, it is now my pleasure to pass over to you, Greg.
Title slide – Slide 1
Speaker 2
Hi, and thanks for joining today's webinar. So, this introductory webinar will have sort of a general focus on the Crime Severity Index or the CSI. It's one measure that we produced to help understand crime in the country. But I'll start by giving a bit of an introduction to the Canadian Center for Justice and Community Safety Statistics.
And then move on to the CSI and some other measures and then end with a demonstration showing sort of how you can access the huge amount of information on the StatCan website, to help give more context to crime data, including the CSI. And this will give you the tools to do some digging into topics of interest for yourselves.
Slide 2
Speaker 2
At its core, Statistics Canada produces data and insights to help Canadians better understand our country's population, resources, economy, society and culture. The Agency is legislated by the Statistics Act to collect, compile, analyze, abstract, and publish statistics in relation to matters including law enforcement, the administration of justice, and corrections. The Agency has a duty to publish information where it meets the conditions of the Statistics Act.
So basically, there's an obligation to collect and disseminate relevant information on the justice system. To fulfill this obligation, the Agency has been part of the National Justice Statistics Initiative for over 40 years, where we partner with justice and public safety departments and stakeholders. The mandate of this initiative is to provide information to the justice community and the public on the nature and extent of crime and victimization, and the administration of criminal and civil justice.
This is all important from a back end or sort of a top-down perspective, since these things are the driving force behind us collecting and publishing our crime data, and it also ensures we are consistently monitoring trends across the country and internationally to try and improve our information.
Slide 3
Speaker 2
The Canadian Center for Justice and Community Safety Statistics helps fulfill the obligations for collecting and disseminating information on justice and public safety for Statistics Canada. It produces data that reflects crime, and justice trends and develops standardized uniform indicators, which are essential for doing comparisons and trends. The Center does this through a variety of data programs.
There are four main programs from the justice side of things that we'll cover here. But we also have programs for community safety, data linkages and data development, as well as a client services division. But again, for our purposes, the Center has four main crime and justice data collection or analysis programs. There's the policing services program, which administers the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey, the Homicide survey, and the Police Administration survey.
There are also separate courts and corrections programs, which administer surveys and collect, compile and release information, and an analytical unit, which analyzes a variety of information, including data from the General Social Survey on Canadians’ Safety and the Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces. These two surveys in particular are self-reported surveys, which means they can capture victimization even for crimes that were never reported to police.
Slide 4
Speaker 2
So, these programs all together complement each other by filling in info on justice pathways and the criminal justice system. And it basically just gives us a more holistic view of crime and justice. So, as I mentioned, the Policing Services program administers the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey, or the UCR, which is a census of all crime recorded by police across Canada. The UCR survey is what we use to look at annual crime statistics information, including the conventional crime rate and the Crime Severity Index. The UCR has been collecting data since 1962, and it currently collects detailed information from over 99% of police services in Canada.
Each police service tracks and records every criminal incident that they respond to or is reported to them in a records management system. And often these are done on the spot in their police cars. So, this information is reported in a uniform and consistent way according to standardized definitions. And this data is then extracted from their systems and sent to our Center, and the UCR team gathers this information, verifies it, checks it for any issues, and then this is what we use to analyze and produce our crime statistics. So, the UCR was developed to capture crime information in a standard and uniform way across the country.
Slide 5
Speaker 2
Since the 1960s, official police reported crime has been typically understood through the lens of the conventional crime rate, which measures the amount of crime reported by police in an area. The Crime Severity Index, or CSI, was developed in 2009 as a complementary measure to the conventional crime rate and self-reported victimization data. It represented the first major change in how Statistics Canada looked at police reported information in nearly 50 years.
And while the CSI has now been out for about 15 years, we recognized the need to provide some additional context on the measure and ensure users have all the all the tools they need to properly understand and interpret the CSI in a broader social context.
The CSI is intended to be one of many sources of information that can be used to better understand the evolving nature of crime in Canada. So, let's have a closer look at how the CSI works.
Slide 6
Speaker 2
To understand the CSI, we need to understand what severity means. The CSI considers all Criminal Code violations and other federal statute offenses in its calculation. To calculate the CSI, a specific weight is applied to each type of crime reported by police. The weight is applied based on standardized information from court sentencing data over the previous five years, and this data is also collected by Statistics Canada through the Integrated Criminal Courts Survey. Crimes that are more likely to result in a prison sentence and for longer sentences will have a higher weight.
This weight represents the severity of the crime and this is what we mean by severity in the index. So, in our example on this slide, robbery has a final weight of 466 while disturbing the peace has a weight of 12. This means that one for one, robbery has a weight about 39 times higher than disturbing the peace.
So even if it happens less frequently, the CSI will highlight its severity. After applying the weights to each type of crime, we then multiply the number of crimes by their assigned weights to get a weighted total. And then we divide this by the population to get a weighted rate.
Slide 7
Speaker 2
Every five years the CSI weights are updated to cover current and recent data. So, this way, if there are changes in legislation or sentencing practices for different types of crime, the weights will be updated to reflect those changes. The updates account for new violations over time, changes in the average sentences of crimes over time, and changes in legislation directing sentencing. So, for example, mandatory minimum sentences. Basically, a given version of the CSI weights will represent the relative seriousness of crimes at that point in time.
Slide 8
Speaker 2
So, you might be wondering now what the difference is with the conventional crime rate, or why are these two sorts of measures important to consider? The conventional crime rate is calculated by adding up the number of crimes reported by police for a given period and area, and then dividing that total by the population. What typically happens is the crime rate is driven by crimes that occur frequently but are relatively less serious.
So, for example, minor thefts disturbing the peace and mischief. On the other hand, the crime rate is less able to reflect changes in less frequent crime that is very serious, like murder. So as an example, with the crime rate, one minor theft has the same impact on the rate as one murder. If you had 100 thefts and one murder, the bulk of the crime rate will be made up of theft.
And if you added one additional murder, the rate would stay essentially the same. But with the CSI, the impact of one murder is about 280 times that of one minor theft.
So, murder has a far heavier weight in the CSI, highlighting its severity, even though it happens far less frequently. So, this time, if you add in one additional murder, there would be a significant change in the CSI value. Relative to the conventional crime rate, the CSI will better reflect the impact of a change in the frequency of murder or other serious crimes. Whereas with the conventional crime rate, this change may go undetected.
Slide 9
Speaker 2
The CSI represents one way of looking at crime. There is no single measure that can adequately summarize all the information that you might want on the extent and characteristics of crime. Different approaches serve different purposes. Yet together they provide a more comprehensive picture of crime than any one approach alone. Combining information from different sources provides a more comprehensive understanding of complex issues.
So, for example, there are many ways of looking at crime, including with police-reported crime counts, courts and corrections data, policing resourcing data, as well as survey data on self-reported victimization and perceptions of safety and trust in institutions. The CSI complements what we know about police-reported crime by looking at the relative severity of crimes and the volume of crime.
By comparison, the police-reported crime rate tells us about the volume of crime coming to the attention of the justice system. But it also adds to our understanding of police workloads and demands on the justice system. We also have a very long time series for the crime rate, dating back to 1962, so we can identify long term historical trends.
Also, victimization data tell us about Canadians experiences of crime, whether or not they are reported to the police. And this is very important because we know through victimization surveys that approximately one third of crime is never reported to police.
So, just for example, with these three measures of crime, by combining them and looking at them all, we can develop a more nuanced understanding of crime trends in Canada.
Slide 10
Speaker 2
The CSI, like any single indicator, should always be interpreted with appropriate context. In the case of the CSI, this includes sort of an internal context, such as the types of crime that make up the CSI and how they are changing over time or within an area, but there is also an external context. So, for example, community and population factors, relative geography, education, housing, the economy and the workforce and other things like that. Broadly, the CSI is one piece of a much larger puzzle that helps Canadians better understand our country: its population, resources, economy, environment, society and culture.
This slide sort of helps to illustrate the amount of information that is released by Statistics Canada at various levels, and the potential interplay between the different sources of information. So, crime data is only one component of a community's characteristics that are relevant.
Also, as an area-based index, the CSI does not account for the specific demographics of each area, or how different groups of people may experience harm and discrimination. So said another way, the CSI is not representative of any single person or group of people in an area. It's an aggregate or average measure of crime.
Importantly, while compiling and validating crime data before we release it, we work with police services to try and explain large changes in crime patterns and include this information in our analytical reports and our data tables. There are also some key considerations, when using the CSI, that can help situate the index value and the crime story in general.
Slide 11
Speaker 2
At its core, the CSI is a measure of crime reported by police in a specific region.
It accounts for the weighted severity of each reported crime relative to the population and is expressed per 100,000 people. Population counts used to calculate the CSI come from the Census of Population, but populations can be dynamic, especially in regions where the economy is largely driven by seasonal activities such as tourism or through certain business activities. Certain regions may also experience higher population movement or mobility due to several factors such as the local job market, housing costs, the location of the area, so if it's a city, a small town or a remote area, and the presence or absence of community services. So, these population characteristics must also be considered when interpreting crime trends.
Where possible, the Center works with police services to identify relevant population factors that may impact reporting in an area. Another essential thing to consider is the fact that not all crimes that occur are reported to police. So, reporting crime depends on several factors, including police resources, public awareness, and the relationship people have with the police and other institutions.
Slide 12
Speaker 2
Speaking more broadly, the CSI was developed in conjunction with stakeholders and the public and is a key indicator in different national frameworks. So, for example, the CSI is part of Canada's actions to achieve the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. These goals provide a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity and to achieve a more sustainable and equitable future.
The CSI is also a key indicator in the Quality-of-Life framework for Canada, which brings together data on the well-being of people in Canada. What is important about these frameworks is that they combine many different pieces of information to arrive at a more holistic understanding of the sort of general well-being or health of an area. This is essential when interpreting crime measures at any level, be it for the country or for a small town.
Slide 13
Speaker 2
Each year, the Canadian Center for Justice and Community Safety Statistics releases several analytical and data driven products related to crime and justice, including the release of annual crime statistics from the UCR survey. When annual crime stats are released, the CSI is included in a few different products. It is part of an analytical article summarizing changes in crime over the last year, it is also included in an accompanying infographic, and it is included in several online data tables with detailed footnotes. These data tables have information for police services across Canada. The data tables are also used to sort of feed into our data visualization dashboards, which help summarize the millions of data points that are generated each year.
To help people navigate all this information. I'll now turn to do a brief demo to highlight where you can go on the StatCan website to get some of this helpful information for yourself.
Slide 14 – Website demo
Speaker 2
So hopefully everyone here has been to the StatCan website before, but if not, this is our landing page for it. And basically, there's two primary types of data products for crime analysis. So, we have online data tables and analytical articles.
And to accompany these, like I said before, we have some other products like infographics and dashboards to help visualize and summarize our information and some reference documents that can help explain certain concepts or how to use them. But with all this information, the website can become a bit overwhelming. And it's also not just for crime data.
So, we'll go through a quick overview of how to access some of the products, provide a demonstration of how to manipulate our online data tables and our virtual dashboards, and also show some helpful additional resources that can help you contextualize the information you’re looking for.
So, I guess to start, it can be helpful to have a look at the StatCan Daily, which is located here. So you click there.
The StatCan Daily is excellent because any new product or analytical article that's released is going to be published through the Daily, through a release statement. And, so this sort of gives you a sense of like what's been happening most recently. And you can also do searches either by subject or just an overall search.
So, for example, if you wanted to go to releases by subject, you'd have a section on crime and justice. And you can always, you know, search for that and if you, you know, had an interest in our police-reported crime statistics report from last year, you could find that. And you can also just do a general search through the daily. If you wanted to search for the Crime Severity Index, and again it would pop up the relevant articles, and reports and products that would be useful.
But if you wanted to dig into more detail or evaluate some more information, there is other information across the top of the website. And some of the headings are, I mean, all the headings, I guess, are self-explanatory, but some of them are more important for our needs than others. So, the subjects heading brings you to a list of hubs or landing pages by subject.
The data and analysis tabs will bring you to pages where you can search for data and analytical reports, and you can filter for a lot of different things in there. And there's also the Census tab, which will bring you to information from the Census of Population. So, to start, if you head over to the subjects heading, it'll bring you to a list of subjects.
And there are many useful links for lots of different information. But for our purposes, we can check out the Crime and Justice Subjects page.
And basically, in here, it has a summary of all the information that is relevant to our programs in the Center, which I mentioned before. So, our correctional services program, courts program, our police-reported information and victimization information. And then, when it comes time to release our latest annual release of crime data this year, we're also going to be adding an area here for resource documents, which will help you access some reference documents that can help better understand some of the information. This will include also a report on understanding and using the CSI.
And then if you wanted more detailed information or more raw data, you can always go to the data header. And in here we can sort of play around with it in multiple different ways. One way is you can go to a pre-arranged subject which would be the crime and justice subject. Or you can also do a search. So, if you're interested in the Crime Severity Index, you could do a keyword search. And we would get a list of information that's relevant. If we click on the first table which happens to be a table summarizing the CSI for Canada, the provinces and territories and census metropolitan areas, we can click there. We also have information that, goes down to the police service level. Just for example, we'll go here.
So, these data tables are standardized for any subject at Statistics Canada. Like they will have a similar look and feel and the same functionality. Importantly, every one of the tables will have detailed footnotes attached to them. And it's really important that we check out these footnotes to get the proper context for understanding the information that’s there.
Then within the table you have many different options. You can see there is a default view where you can adjust some drop down menus here. So, if you were interested in say Quebec or Montreal and Quebec and a different reference period, we can make adjustments there.
And you end up with, you know, a table with many data points. But if you're going to add or remove data, you can also customize the look and feel of your table and include additional information that wasn't available to you on that main page. So again, here we can select from multiple geographies.
So maybe we are interested in Canada and Montreal. And then you can select or deselect any statistics that you may want. So, if we're only interested in the Crime Severity Index over time we can click on that. And the reference period, you can also change. So, let's just look at the longest period we have. And then you'll click apply.
And now you end up with this very wide table which isn't particularly easy to understand. So, one thing you can do is customize the layout of your table. So, we might want our geography to be shown as a row. So we can go to apply.
And then we're going to end up with a different table now. So, it's going to show our information over time for the two geographies that we are, you know, interested in.
And then once you've set up your table, you do have the option to download this. So, you can download the table either all of the data that's underlying it or just the information that you are showing in your current view.
So, if you click that you’d be given various download options. And then you can also save your customized table. So, you just click here and then it gives you a link like a URL which you can copy and paste into like a word document or an email or whatever. And then you could return to the layout that you previously selected, which is definitely very nice and helpful.
So, we do have, every year when we release our crime statistics information, we update I think 38 of these tables, for just our crime stats information alone.
Speaker 2 And they also exist at multiple different levels of geographies. So, there's a lot of information there.
To help sort of summarize some of that information and help visualize it, we also developed some dashboards. We can get to those again if we go to our data tab. And if we search for Crime Severity Index.
You'll notice that we have our tables tab again where we just were. But we also have a data visualizations header. And this will bring us to any data visualizations that will help with our relevant search. So, we can go to this one. So, this is a dashboard that has sort of selected key indicators for crime. And there's a lot of information here. So, I'll keep it fairly brief. But let's say if we want to continue our example of looking at Montreal. You can do a search here.
And when we search for Montreal, we'll see that these indicators are updated to reflect the information for Montreal, for the reference period that we selected above.
And what's nice about this is you can start to dig a little deeper into some of the information that might be relevant to you. So, you might see, okay, well, the crime rate increased 12% in Montreal from 2021 to 2022. And these provide a summary of important or typically key, crime types that are of interest. And one of them could be breaking and entering. So, if we look at breaking enter, we'll see that it went up 15%. But in isolation we don't really know what that means. Which is then why we might want to look at a crime trend over time. So, we could click on breaking and enter here. And we'll get this line that shows us our trend line for breaking enter and for Montreal over time. So, in the last ten years basically we can see that sort of breaking entering has actually been trending downward despite having increased in the last year. Another way of looking at different offenses is how they impact the Crime Severity Index in a region.
So again, if you're interested in, breaking and entering, this chart down here, it gives you for each year the percentage contribution that that violation is contributing to the CSI. So, ten years ago, if you look at breaking and entering, it made up 26% of the CSI. So, 26% of the CSI value in that year in the CMA of Montreal. But now when we look at 2022, that contribution has gone down to 13%. So, so looking at that, we can see that breaking entering over time has been trending down and is also contributing less to the CSI in the region we are looking at.
Another way we can look at this is on a second page. We can look at some Crime Severity Index information. Again, for the geography we selected for, over time and also relative to, you know, the other provinces and CMAs. One interesting thing is, for example, you can look at the percentage change year over year and the CSI value, for example, you can see here in 2020, at the sort of height of the pandemic period, the beginning of the pandemic, we saw large decreases in crime. So we can see that fairly easily visually here.
We do have other information in our other dashboards. And this is all exists on our police reported information hub. There is currently five of them. Another thing you could potentially do is say you're interested in certain violations. We do have a dashboard for that where you can compare violations within a given geography.
So just a very simple example if you're interested in breaking and entering and fraud. So, you can search for those two violation types. And we can see the sort of trend lines for breaking and entering and fraud and see how it looks over time across locations. So, province territory and across the CMAs. And again, you can select for different reference periods. And you can also select for different geographies. So, if we were again interested in our Montreal example, you could click there, and we would see the information relevant to Montreal.
So, this is a lot of information, a lot of data, which is great if you have an idea of what you might want to be looking for or have experience analyzing crime data. Otherwise, we also have detailed analytical articles that are published through the daily and through our juristat catalog. And our juristat catalog is like an online journal with many articles released throughout the year. And these articles will include detailed analysis as well as important context for understanding crime trends. And we can get there a few ways So, one way is through the analysis tab at the top. And for example, we can look up our article here. And if we click on that we'll be given a lot of different information for different types of articles for crime data. And, you know, it really just depends on the topic you're looking for. So, if you're looking into firearms. And you search for firearms, you get that information.
You can also do this by just searching directly in the analysis tab. So again if you're looking for fraud you can search for that. And we would get any instances of fraud that are relevant to our search. You can also look for the Crime Severity Index. And again, be presented with any analytical articles that you know are relevant to our search.
And I guess another thing you can do is we can look for other information that might not be directly correlated with crime but could still be relevant. So, if you wanted to look up like rural Canada, you might find information for rural statistics. In Canada, we might find crime related information. So, we can always, you know, add in a filter here and we can find this information.
So, as we covered earlier in the webinar, it's really important when interpreting crime data that we take into consideration, the broader context around our numbers. So, for example, we would want to understand how the information is changing over time. What crimes make up the general pattern of crime and the community context for the area or areas we are looking at.
Lots of this information is available in our analytical articles. But if you're just looking at data points, it can be a bit trickier. So, we may want to get information on, say, the socio-economic profile or the population or demographic profile of an area. To do this, there are many great resources on the StatCan website.
We can go back to our subjects tab. And if we go to society and community. We have the option to select a bunch of different information and two really important hubs of information. One is the Rural Statistics Canada hub, and one is the Center for Municipal and Local Data. So, these two hubs will present to you more local area characteristics that can help contextualize other information in an area. Another great source of information is from our Census of Population because it also has detailed census profiles. So, if we go to our Census tab, you can go to Census of Population and then it has a list of census profiles. So again, in keeping with our example with Montreal, you can search for that.
And we can, you know, depending on what level of geography or disaggregation we're looking for, we can select for it. But we'll go to the CMA of Montreal. And when you do that, you're presented with a lot of information where you can also add and remove data depending on what you're interested in. But this is great because it gives you the sort of external context that might be important for understanding crime statistics. So, things like the demographics of the area, mobility and migration, housing, family, education and the labour and workforce situation.
And again, when we're in there, we can also add geographies if we want to do a comparison. So if we wanted to look up the province of Quebec, we could do that. And we’ll click on it. And now we have our two geographies where we can sort of compare and contrast, some other characteristics, that might be relevant when we're doing a crime analysis.
So basically, by combining information from these different sources, it makes interpreting crime trends and makes comparisons between different regions or over time, a lot more comprehensive.
So yeah, I hope the webinar was very helpful. And I'll just turn it back to our host. Thank you.
Slide 15 and slide 16
Speaker 1
Thank you, Gregory, for the presentation. So, we will now do a poll to help improve future sessions. I'll just launch that now. Okay. So, today's webinar was presented on behalf of Statistics Canada's data service centers. Some of our services include helping data users with data requests and offering workshops and webinars. Again, if you have any questions about this webinar, feel free to call us or email us. We put the email in the chat below. Our contact information is also on the screen here.
On behalf of Statistics Canada, I want to take this opportunity to thank you very much for your participation today and for your continued interest in the data we publish. As users of the data, we know you understand the value of these data, and we count on you to help us spread the word to your colleagues, friends and family of the importance of their participation in the StatCanada surveys. Thank you again and enjoy the rest of the day. Please hold on for the poll. And yeah, thank you all.
