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The latest crime data for Kelowna shows the city’s situation is improving but a security company in the downtown core says it’s worse than ever.

“I highly doubt those numbers because it's only getting worse month by month. And especially what we're dealing with, it's only getting worse,” security company Missing Link’s project manager Ryder Davis told iNFOnews.ca.

Kelowna was the nation’s crime capital two years ago until it was unseated by Kamloops, but according to Statistics Canada data from the summer Kelowna still ranks 7th in the country.

Kelowna’s property crime rate went down by two per cent, and the crime severity index dropped by seven per cent in 2024, according to Kelowna RCMP’s annual report.

The crime severity index measures how serious crimes are and calculates an average. Crimes are given a severity value first-degree murder has a crime severity value of 8273.62 while mischief has a value of 26.99.

Missing Link has security guards throughout downtown including condo buildings, hotels and they do general patrols. Davis said the amount of crime and its severity have been escalating in recent months.

“We're dealing with this stuff every single day and we have a lot of violent incidents taking place. We have a lot of above just petty theft at this point. We're getting into real crime at this point and it's something that we need to work as a community to bring it down,” he said. “We've seen a pretty large increase in crime, everything from burglary, trespassing, theft, vandalism, everything over the last couple months.”

Missing Link is meeting with strata council members, property managers and representatives from buildings around downtown to come up with ways to help each other stay safe.

The goal of the meeting is to come up with a community safety plan so that residents have ways to be proactive about crime downtown.

“It's going to be principles and practices that the residents should follow and also the security team should follow. And then a letter will be sent over to the RCMP to address any of the concerns that we've seen to see where they can assist us in our effort,” he said.

Davis said one of the major ways safety downtown could be improved is better communication between buildings and businesses as well as with the RCMP.

“We need to find a way to get information over to them quicker because these incidents, when they take place, they're not taking place for an hour. They're taking place for 15, 20 minutes. You need to catch them in the act as it's happening,” he said. “From one building to the next, there's not enough communication. So these individuals will hit one unit and then the next night they’ll go to the next one and the next night they'll go to the next because there's no transparency between the stratas.”

He said everyone keeping an eye out for each other is a big step towards improving community safety.

“That makes it a lot easier when you have a number of residents calling about one individual rather than one taking a look throughout the community to see if they can find them,” he said.

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