Acting Police Chief Dean Rae (left) and Mayor Michael Fougere (right). Photo courtesy Manfred Joehnck.
When it comes to crime, Saskatchewan leads the Nation with its two biggest cities scoring number one and two.
The 2015 numbers were released this morning by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics.
The stats look at all types of crime, from minor to murder, and compares them with 33 other cities across Canada on a per capita basis.
Regina had the highest murder rate, while Saskatoon came in a close second.
In overall crime, Saskatoon had the highest rate, followed by Regina. Acting Police Chief, Dean Rae says the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“It is concerning to be number one and number two in that way,” he said. “If you look at it in a different way, we have been doing our community perception surveys for a number of years and the perception by the community is that they feel safe.”
Regina Mayor, Michael Fougere says he is encouraged to see Regina lead the nation in crime reduction over the last ten years, second only to Halifax.
“The overall crime rate has been going down over ten years, that’s a positive, he said. “We have had many public surveys indicating a strong support for the police service — a strong sense of being safe in our community, but the work is never done — there is no question about that.”
The statistics are based on crimes per one hundred thousand people, so one murder in a smaller city can make a big difference in the overall violent crime rating.
There were eight murders in Regina last year and 10 in Saskatoon. Even though Saskatoon had more murders, its murder rate was lower because it has a larger population than Regina.
Provincially there were 43 murders in 2015, giving us the highest murder rate of all the provinces. It also represented an 80 percent provincial murder rate increase from 2014.