Crime and crime severity down nationally and locally

There’s good news both locally and nationally on the number of crimes and the severity of them.

Tuesday, Statistics Canada released its annual Police Reported Crime report.

Nationally, the Crime Severity Index (CSI) dropped 8% last year to 73 while the City of Belleville’s CSI was down 16% to 71 in 2020, the lowest it’s been in five years.

In Belleville, break and enters were down 22% and the number of sex assault charges was 30% lower.  Those statistics mirrored the national trend.

Police Chief Mike Callaghan believes the pandemic had a little to do with drops in the crime rate nationally and locally.

“But I think it’s also a concerted effort by the police, the policing community, and the community at large including all of our social service providers working more collaboratively.”

Last year there was a 39% increase in assaults causing bodily harm, from 88 to 124 and assaults against police more than doubled to 31 incidents last year.

Chief Callaghan stressed that policing statistics needed to be looked at over a time period of more than one year to be relevant because of the unpredictable nature of criminal incidents.

“By the same token when we see that overall Crime Severity Index being lower that is very positive.”

Nationally the overall and violent CSIs dropped for the first time after five straight years of increases and were 11% lower than 10 years ago in 2010.

On a negative note nationally the number of police-reported hate crimes increased by 37% to 2,669 incidents last year compared with 1,951 in 2019.

Chief Callaghan said as of June there had been no hate crime charges laid in Belleville so far this year and didn’t believe there were any significant number of incidents last year.

Callaghan said “we’d be naive to think hate crimes aren’t happening in our community.  It’s possible people aren’t reporting them.  It’s difficult to know.”