Brandon "clearly a safe community"; crime way below provincial average
4/23/2009 at 10:28 AM
Don't know how many people caught this on the Police website yesterday, but they released Brandon statistics as they relate to a Statistics Canada nationwide study on crime yesterday.
The study used a new system that places more weighting on violent/serious crimes than less serious crimes.
In the study, it was determined that BC, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have the highest crime in the Nation... but per the BPS info, Brandon is not the reason for the high provincial numbers.. *especially* when it comes to violent crimes.
Here are the Crime Severity Index numbers, comparing Brandon and Manitoba province-wide:
Overwall Crime
Brandon: 121.8, Manitoba: 149.9
Violent Crimes
Brandon: 97.3, Manitoba: 173.6
Non-violent Crimes
Brandon: 131.2, Manitoba: 140.7
Based on this, it's concluded in the news release that Brandon is "clearly a safe community." We tend to get concerned whenever there is crime in the city (which is perfectly natural), but sometimes it takes numbers like this to realize how much worse off we could be.
Here's the full BPS release:
http://www.brandon.ca/main.nsf/Pages+By+ID/1230?opendocument&ID=7647
and here's a story on the new study from a nationwide perspective:
http://www.canada.com/Crime+severity+declines+according+index/1518704/story.html