There wasn’t much change in either the overall Crime Severity Index (CSI) or the violent Crime Severity Index locally last year compared to 2022.
According to 2023 Police Reported Crime Statistics released by Statistics Canada late last week, the overall CSI in the Belleville-Quinte West Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) last year was 65.28.
That’s down 1.66% from 2022. The Belleville CMA includes Belleville, Quinte West, Tyendinaga-Deseronto, and Stirling-Rawdon.
The violent CSI locally was 72.68 up by a fraction (.26%) from the year before.
For Ontario the overall CSI was 60.88, up 3.5% while the violent CSI was 78.52, up just under 1%.
Locally there were 1,399 violent crimes (homicide, assault, sex offences etc.) in 2023, up by only 16 incidents from 2022.
There was one homicide in 2023, the same as in the year before.
In 2019 there were four homicides recorded. At that time the local violent CSI was 92.63.
The Crime Severity Index tracks changes in the severity of police-reported crime by accounting for both the amount of crime reported by police in a given jurisdiction and the relative seriousness of the crimes.
Elsewhere the overall CSI in Kingston in 2023 was 72.15, a slight drop from the year before. The violent CSI was 66.68, a 20% drop from 2022.
In Peterborough the overall CSI was 60.19 in 2023, down a bit, while the violent CSI was 77.37, basically unchanged from the year before.
Of 15 Ontario Census Metropolitan Areas, Belleville-Quinte West ranked 10th in the violent CSI category. Thunder Bay and Greater Sudbury had the most violent crimes with CSIs of 181.05 and 123.01 respectively while Barrie and Guelph had the least violent crime with CSIs of 57.95 and 65.52 respectively.
Much more detail can be found on crime statistics here.
