Crime in North Vancouver

One of the biggest claims made by the anti-highrise crowd is that more people living in Lynn Valley will mean a skyrocketing crime rate.  Often this claim is accompanied by the assertion that crime in North Vancouver has doubled or tripled in the last (insert arbitrary number of) years.

In a nutshell, the basis premise of the anti-development crowd is that any person who might choose to move to Lynn Valley, except those who buy single family detached homes, are criminals.

To start this discussion, let's begin by looking at the claims that crime is already out of control in North Vancouver. A handy tool for that is Statistics Canada's Crime Severity Index.

In a nutshell, the CSI allows you to compare different towns and cities in a consistent manner.

The Crime Severity Index (is) a new tool for measuring police-reported crime in Canada that for the first time tracks changes in the severity of crime, not just volume.The report also examines how crime is measured in Canada, as well as recent improvements to statistics on crime that are gathered from the police.

Nationwide the overall CSI for 2010 was 82.7.  For the District it was the remarkably low 48.9.

In other words, there is really not much crime in the District of North Vancouver, although in the District we do skew towards violent crime compared to the City.

And, if you compare it to other municipalities that sit around 90,000 people you'll see that even within similarly sized places we're sitting in the lower end of the scale.

Source: Crime Severity Index values for 238 police services policing communities over 10,000 population, 2010