The chair of the Police Services Board is disputing data used in a recent news article suggesting that Sault Ste. Marie has one of the highest crime rates in all of Canada.
Lisa Vezeau-Allen told members of the board during its monthly meeting Thursday that the data which informed the article was collected by numbeo.com — a crowd-sourcing database which derives its data based on the perceptions of its users — and not Statistics Canada, which obtains its data on crime from law enforcement agencies directly.
“It’s not an authorized authority of actually taking hard data, so it’s very subjective,” Vezeau-Allen told board members.
Crime rates for the Sault found on numbeo.com were informed by a total of 71 contributors over the past three years.
“A lot of it is very subjective to the individual, and I wanted it to be very clear that this is not based on actual data that we have as a police service or that StatCan has. So, I just wanted the public to be very aware of that, and I encourage them to go to the website to look it up and to understand more about it,” said Vezeau-Allen. “But it certainly is not an accurate representation of our community.”
Sault Ste. Marie Police Services Chief Hugh Stevenson also took issue with the data used for the news article.
“From my standpoint, it’s not an accurate depiction of crime in Sault Ste. Marie or its weight in relation to other type of data,” Stevenson told members of the Police Services Board Thursday. “So you know, from an empirical perspective, the sampling procedures are obviously challengeable.
“However, I also suggest that I don’t simply as chief take this information and disregard it. I look at it as a challenge to improve, and we are always constantly trying to improve how we reduce and prevent crime — and in fairness, it’s not a bad month to present this information,” he continued. “We’ve had a pretty good year-to-date in terms of crime reduction in the city, so let’s just hope that that trend continues.”
The most recent crime statistics from Sault Ste. Marie Police Service showed notable decreases in break-and-enters (31.7 per cent), robbery (56.3 per cent), theft from vehicles (23 per cent) and theft (14.3 per cent) in the first eight months of 2022 when compared to the same period in 2021.