Crime is a top Alberta election issue — but the issues facing Canadian cities run deep
CBC
A man was fatally shot last month outside a busy Safeway grocery store in Kensington, a trendy walkable district in northwest Calgary with plenty of coffee shops, restaurants and retail stores.
Ian Cameron was shopping at the grocery store when the incident happened. He told CBC News at the time that "this stuff is happening way too much right now. We seriously need to do something about this."
Other violent incidents across the province have been widely shared on social media, like a shooting on a Calgary bus. In Edmonton, the number of calls to police about violent crime on the city's transit system increased nearly 53 per cent in 2022 compared to the year before.
"I don't know what the exact reason is for so much crime and so sudden in the last month," Cameron said, adding he had recently purchased a car to avoid taking public transit in Calgary as often as he had been.
The day after the shooting outside the Safeway last month, Calgary police Chief Mark Neufeld said he was "disgusted" by the incident.
But the police chief wanted to draw a distinction.
"I want to reassure Calgarians that Calgary remains a safe city," the chief said.
He pointed to the crime severity index (CSI), one of the tools that Statistics Canada uses to measure crime and to track the volume and severity of what's reported. It hadn't changed much, he said.
That's true. In Calgary and across the province, the CSI is still down from its peak in the late 1990s, though recent spikes have been reported.
Shooting and homicides have also decreased compared with the same time last year, Neufeld noted. That might not track with what has been showing up in headlines, the chief said.
As of Tuesday, there had been 43 shootings in Calgary, compared to 61 during the same period last year. There have been seven homicides so far this year, compared with 12 in 2022.
When it comes to the data around crime in the province, it's a bit of a mixed bag. And the picture in Calgary isn't the same as what the police force is reporting in Edmonton.
But criminologists say the perceptions of crime that residents pick up from headlines — and from politicians who frequently raise concerns about crime — do actually raise the fear of crime within communities, which has been tied to negative impacts to physical and mental health.
"We have to remember that even today, with crime rates where they are, we are much, much safer in terms of being a victim of a crime than we were in the 1990s," said Mount Royal University criminal justice professor Doug King.
