Data shows violent crime up since 2015. Police say it’s not the full story

Newly released data on the rise of violent crime across Canada only tells part of the story, a national police organization says.

The volume and severity of police-reported crime has been on “an upward trend that began in 2015,” Statistics Canada said in a report released last week.

The violent crime severity index “remained virtually unchanged” last year, the statistics agency said, because there was a decline in more serious crimes such as homicide. However, there was nearly a seven per cent increase in violent crimes such as assault, robbery and extortion, Statistics Canada said.

But the National Police Federation (NPF), the union representing roughly 20,000 RCMP members, says the data may not fully reflect the true picture of crime rates across the country — something Statistics Canada itself also notes.

“One firearm robbery in a small town in, say, Saskatchewan skews the data with respect to violent crime in Saskatchewan as a whole,” NPF president and CEO Brian Sauvé told Global News in an interview.

“Saskatchewan has a lot of small towns. But does that make Saskatchewan a particularly violent province?”

The overall crime severity index was up two per cent in 2023, the Statistics Canada report shows, marking a third straight annual increase.

The non-violent crime severity index rose three per cent last year, after a five per cent increase the year before. The most recent raise was driven by a five per cent bump in police-reported motor vehicle theft — a topic of growing concern and attention over the past year — and double-digit spikes in fraud and shoplifting.

When it comes to violent crime, the severity index increased 32 per cent since 2015, which the Conservatives emphasize was when the current Liberal government was