Williams Lake is no longer number one when it comes to the crime severity index of communities with populations greater than 10,000 people.
Based on 2015 statistics for 305 police stations, Williams Lake rated fourth place in overall crime severity, third place in non-violent crime severity and seventh in violent crime severity.
North Battleford, Sask. was first for overall crime severity, Prince Albert, Sask, was second and Yellowknife, NWT was third.
Those numbers are an improvement over 2014’s stats when the city was rated first for violent crime and second for overall crime, said Williams Lake RCMP Insp. Milo MacDonald.
“It is good news in a sense we’ve made some statistical improvements,” MacDonald told the Tribune. “We are heading in the right direction, but obviously there is some distance to go before we get to the place where we are hopefully headed.”
Putting the statistics into perspective, MacDonald said larger municipalities have a huge advantage over smaller ones when it comes to this type of statistical analysis.
Comparing statistics from January to July 2015 with January to July of this year, MacDonald noted there are some substantial improvements overall in every crime type.
“We were really not sure how we would look because earlier this year we had spikes in violent crime and spikes in auto theft, but we are substantially down in our statistical numbers for 2016, so that’s encouraging.”
Equally encouraging is the fact 40 per cent of the people on the detachment’s prolific offenders list are seeking out treatment options in order to get themselves off the list, MacDonald added.
“We’ve got people that are actually attending programs and people that have expressed an interest in doing that like they never did before. We are actively trying to put opportunities in front of them so they are in a position where they can make some choices.”