CSI rural: Cold Lake among communities calling for end to Crime Severity Index

Leaders from eleven western Canadian communities meet in Saskatoon to denounce the Crime Severity Index. Image: North Battleford.

Cold Lake is taking umbrage with the national Crime Severity Index statistics, along with several other communities, who feel targeted as smaller communities.

Late last week, Cold Lake Mayor Craig Copeland went to Saskatoon to meet with leaders, and are calling for an immediate stop in the publication of the Crime Severity Index (CSI) rankings for communities until consultations are held with smaller communities and Indigenous leadership.

In year’s past, Cold Lake, and increasingly more Lakeland communities, have rated high across Canada due to the nature of how the numbers are calculated.

They say this data should be sent to policing units only, and not used as an unintentional lever that harms local economies and attracting workers. They believe the data is misinterpreted and disproportionately affects the smaller communities on the list.

“The issue is that communities over 10,000 are rated on the same scale as say Toronto,” said Mayor Craig Copeland on The Morning After. 

It also promotes systemic racial bias, they say, and negatively impacts reconciliation.

Their problem specifically is with the thresholds that aggregate population numbers.

For example, they submit that North Battleford, which has the highest Crime Severity Index in Canada according to the Statistics Canada list, would be ranked as number 16 on a list of RCMP detachment areas in Saskatchewan only.

“If you have one murder in in your community, and you had zero the previous year, unfortunately, all of a sudden now you’re 100 per cent increase,” said Copeland. 

“Why this is important to Cold Lake and other communities is that I just recently had a doctor, had a conversation when they researched Cold Lake, this number pops up. We’re relatively a very safe community. And unfortunately, he’s looking at that rating and saying, ‘well, I’m scared to bring my family here.'”

When pushed back on by saying that more people are feeling unsafe, Copeland said the area has changed the last couple of years.

“The area has changed and like everywhere, Edmonton, etc, other communities. Hopefully we can address this. The federal government needs to step in, and it gets to a point now, where they’re not even getting charged. Whether they’re high on meth or drunk, and the behaviour is disturbing restaurants or the business community. The system is broken,” he said.

An official press release after the conference said, officials in attendance from Statistics Canada were able to present and outline how statistics are calculated to the attendees, but they were unable to provide an official comment on the group’s assertions that the publication of this list is systemically biased against Indigenous peoples.

In 2022, St. Paul and Bonnyville were one and two provincially on the CSI.