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(KIM ANDERSON / iNFOnews.ca)

Kamloops officials are refuting the "crime capital of Canada" title gifted by a recent Statistics Canada report.

Supt. Jeff Pelley of Kamloops RCMP has spoken to media and city council to downplay the significance of the report, which he says unfairly pits the city of 100,000 people against urban centres like Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto. Similarly-sized cities or those that are smaller, tend to have similar crime rates or worse, especially in Western Canada.

"I refute the fact that Kamloops is not a safe community. It is, in fact, a safe community and we're going to make it safer," Pelley said in an interview with iNFOnews.ca.

City councillors, too, put little stock in the statistics that suggest Kamloops had the highest crime rate and crime severity in 2023 when pitted against the country's largest cities. It's the first year Kamloops has been compared to those cities as StatsCan designated it and surrounding communities as a Census Metropolitan Area in the last census.

After news of Kamloops topping the list spread last week, the detachment commander headed to city council to brief elected officials on what his officers are seeing on the ground and their strategies to tackle crime.

Councillors were content in accepting that, despite landing the top spot on the StatsCan crime podium, it doesn't truly reflect the city.

"I'll quote Wayne Gretzky: 'In my opinion, stats are for losers," Coun. Kelly Hall said in a July 30 council meeting. "I think what we need to be talking about is what are we as a community and council are doing to protect our community, and that involves our RCMP members."

He listed several different initiatives the City and Kamloops RCMP have taken on to address both crime and poverty before he was joined by others who said Kamloops is not crime-ridden, as the comparison might suggest.

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Coun. Katie Neustaeter went on to say she's concerned about the title of "crime capital," but she considers it an opportunity to lobby the province to deliver new services.

"I believe that everything's an opportunity, and this report certainly does give us a brand new leverage point as we advocate for these pieces that we've been banging the drum on," she said. "Community court? Argue with us that we don't need a community court when all the partners are in place, everything is ready to go and we're carrying this title now? Come on now — same thing with the sobering centre. We've updated it, it's sitting there, we desperately need it and it impacts these numbers."

She and Coun. Mike O'Reilly asked Pelley about the detachment's progress recruiting new members it already has the funding for. He said it's still ongoing and didn't have an updated figure, but he did say the detachment has brought on experienced officers from elsewhere while it also has a request for eight recruits from Depot.

Criminologist Bryan Kinney said the reaction from councillors is not surprising.

"Police will say the crime rate is high because we're doing more enforcement and by the way we need more resources. And when crime rate is down that's because we've been doing our jobs, but if we're going to keep doing this we need more resources," he said. "So the story fits both ways."

The Simon Fraser University academic contrasted the Kamloops response to Kelowna's where police celebrated its drop to third-worst among crime in Canadian metropolitan areas. While the statistic is not all that important in Kamloops, it appears worth celebrating in Kelowna.

While Kelowna is "beating their chest" over the drop from the top spot in Canadian crime, Kamloops is going through the growing pains of becoming a larger centre, Kinney said. 

"There's a couple of factors for that," he said. "But really what's happened is Kelowna's gotten big enough that its base population can even out those changes."

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StatsCan puts the police-reported crime rate for the Kamloops metro area at 13,116 per 100,000 people and 15,726 per 100,000 for the city itself. The crime severity index is 165 and 172, respectively. The index is a rating based on a formula that measures the police-reported crime rate, while giving a higher value to more serious crimes.

Kinney added, however, that Kamloops officials who suggest comparing the city to other metro areas is a poor barometer for crime are largely correct.

He said a more useful tactic would be to compare Kamloops against itself in years previous, which is something largely ignored by councillors and Pelley at the July 30 council meeting.

StatsCan figures place the city's crime severity last year at its highest since 2007. In 2022, Kamloops also reached its highest crime rate since 2007 and it dropped slightly last year. The weighted clearance rate, which measures how many police files are cleared whether by charge or otherwise, is at its lowest since StatsCan began tracking in 1998. The crime severity index follows a similar trend as Kelowna and the provincial average, falling from 2007 then rising again steadily in 2015. The hikes in Kamloops, however, are higher than the province's larger cities.

"You have to understand that over the last few years our scoring measures have changed from previous years as well, so that may impact some of those rates," Pelley said when asked about the local changes in crime. "We look at a number of strategies when it involves enforcement of certain offenders or multi-jurisdictional offenders being a hub city."

Kinney said StatsCan also changed its reporting criteria around 2017 to include more unfounded police files in the crime rate, which lines up with a steady increase in Kamloops crime rates and its dropping clearance rate.

He also said it may not be a sign that Kamloops is truly more dangerous, adding that crime severity is less consistent in smaller cities where a single homicide or aggravated assault can have a more pronounced effect on statistics than larger ones. A silver lining of the city's crime index is that those are largely due to non-violent crimes by a wide margin, he said. Prince George, Chilliwack and Nanaimo, for example, are fairly equal between violent and non-violent crime.

Kinney is overall not alarmed about Kamloops reaching the top of the list, partly because it is relatively small and statistics can be less consistent and also because the severity index is lopsided toward non-violent crime.

But even within the array of crimes under the "non-violent" category, it can be difficult to specify what accounts for the high index score. Non-violent crime statistics even shows break-ins, vehicle thefts went down just slightly compared to 2022, but mischiefs, a generally less serious crime, was up by 300 reports. Drug possession charges, meanwhile, predictably took a nosedive as the province brought in new decriminalization laws, but trafficking files didn't substantially change.

Kinney added the figures are based on police-submitted data to StatsCan, meaning it only measures the crime police know about. He said less serious crimes are less likely to be reported to police, sometimes between 30 and 70%, while more serious crimes like aggravated assault or murder will be reported much closer to 100% of the time.

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