Abbotsford-Mission is Canada's new murder capital
Saskatoon has lost its dubious honour as Canada's murder capital. The new national homicide survey from Statistics Canada, released today (for 2008 stats), reveals that Abbotsford-Mission, in British Columbia, is the country's new murder capital, with a rate of 4.71 killings per 100,000 people, among the country's 33 biggest centres (chart of those centres from the StatsCan report below). Winnipeg comes in second at 4.07. Saskatoon has fallen out of the top 1o, registering four murders in 2008, for a rate of 1.55. Six urban areas in the big-33 list recorded no homicides last year. Nationally, there were 611 murders last year, giving the country a national rate of 1.83. Canada's rate remains three times lower than the National American rate. In 2008, there were 16,272 killings in the U.S., a rate of 5.4 killings per 100,000 people.
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posted at 5:26 PM PERMALINK
5 Comments:
You realize that the Census Metropolitan Area for Toronto is a much, much larger area than Toronto proper. You can see a map of the CMA here.
Take a look at it. Stats Canada is grouping Toronto with Milton, Orangeville, Caledon, Vaughn, King, Uxbridge and even Georgina. How many murders do you think Georgina has per year?
What this means is that Toronto's high rate (for its citizens) is reduced by the population of all the surroundings areas. Quite a statistical trick!
If you took the actual population of Toronto and applied the murders in Toronto to that area, the murder rate would be significantly higher; and so most likely, would be the public outcry.
Frank
I don't think there'll be any outcry once folks look at the City of Toronto numbers.
There were 70 murders in the City of Toronto in 2008, in the geographic area that includes 2,669,936 people policed by the Toronto Police Service(these are Toronto Police stats).
That's a homicide rate in the city of 2.62, up from the rate for the census metropolitan area of 1.86 but still well below the rates for most large western CMAs and certainly not what I'd call "significantly higher."
The Toronto city figures come from the Toronto Police Service year end statistical report:
http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/publications/files/reports/2008statsreport.pdf
Rob,
I'd call a 140% difference 'significantly higher'. The importance of this bias is that it makes Toronto, Toronto politicians, Toronto justice services look like they're doing a better job than they are. So it bamboozles the public for the benefit of the politicians.
There is another issue which the concept of 'rate' also confuses. This is, simply, that rate is irrelevant in a limited geographic area; the real issue is number per locality (or square mile).
You can see how this works by imagining the population of any city going up, say, 50% and the murder rate declining, say, 20% (from 2.62 to 2.09). So, taking your numbers, we go from 2,669,936 to 4,004,904. The number of murders, instead of getting better, gets worse: from 70 to 83.
So, if you lived there, there would be more gunshots, more blood in the street, more fatherless gangbangers arrested and, in short, a worse environment for everyone. Meanwhile, the Mayor would say Toronto was safer than ever, the Premier would congratulate the Police and the Toronto Star would beam with pride.
Still have more dead people though.
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