Thunder Bay Ranks as Second Most Violent City in Canada
THUNDER BAY – Thunder Bay continues to rank as one of Canada’s more crime ridden cities. Thunder Bay ranks tenth in Canada as the city with the most crime, according to figures just released by Statistics Canada. The Crime Severity Index for Thunder Bay is 80.1.
That places Thunder Bay as the second most violent city in Canada, behind Winnipeg. There was a significant drop in the homicide rate in Thunder Bay last year, which contributed to the drop in ranking from the number one position as most dangerous city last year.
Across Canada for the first time in a decade the overall rate of violent crime across Canada went up.
For Thunder Bay, the drop represents a positive move forward, but also demonstrates that there is a lot of work still needed to be done.
The crime rate measures the volume of crime reported to the police per 100,000 population, while the CSI measures both the volume and severity of crimes reported to the police. To calculate the CSI, each violation is assigned a weight. CSI weights are based on the violation’s incarceration rate and the average length of prison sentence handed down by criminal courts. The more serious the average sentence, the higher the weight for that offence. To calculate the CSI, the weighted offences are summed and then divided by the population. As with the other indexes, to simplify comparison, the CSI is then standardized to a base year of “100” (for the CSI, the base year is 2006). In other words, all CSI values are relative to the Canada-level CSI for 2006.
Police-reported crime in Canada, as measured by both the Crime Severity Index (CSI) and the crime rate, increased in 2015. This marked the first rise in police-reported crime in 12 years. The CSI grew 5% from 2014 to 2015, but was 31% lower than it was a decade earlier in 2005.
The rise in the CSI, which measures the volume and severity of police-reported crime, was primarily a result of more incidents of fraud, breaking and entering, robbery, and homicide. A notable increase in crime reported in Alberta and smaller increases in British Columbia, Ontario and Saskatchewan also contributed to the upward movement of the national CSI.
Chart 1 
Police-reported crime severity indexes, 1998 to 2015
The traditional police-reported crime rate, which measures the volume of police-reported crime relative to the population size, also increased in 2015, rising 3% from the previous year. While the crime rate grew in 2015, it has generally been on a downward trend since the early 1990s, with the only other increase reported in 2003.
Chart 2
Police-reported crime rates, 1962 to 2015
There were almost 1.9 million Criminal Code incidents (excluding traffic) reported by police in 2015, approximately 70,000 more than in 2014.
In 2015, rates of police-reported crime increased for most Criminal Code violations. Among the violent violations with an increase in rate were attempted murder (+22%), Criminal Code violations specific to the use, discharge and pointing of firearms (+22%), homicide (+15%), robbery (+5%), sexual assaults (+4%), and major assaults (+3%).
Rates for all types of property crimes increased from 2014 to 2015, including fraud (+15%), possession of stolen property (+13%), identify fraud (+9%), theft over $5,000 (excluding motor vehicles) (+8%), theft of a motor vehicle (+6%) and breaking and entering (+4%).
