As with every incarnation of the Pinkerton Crime Index, building indices to assess crime risk across Canada presented unique challenges, requiring the development of statistical machinery that enriches the crime data officially published by the government’s Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics.
Official crime statistics in Canada are published annually at the police agency level. To construct a monthly measure of risk we must utilize more granular information. Police dispatch data provides detailed depictions of crime events, providing insight on the date, location, and time of day of a particular incident. However, this dispatch data is only available for a select number of police agencies and cities across the country. Knowing that crime has a strong seasonal pattern, that can vary both across different climates and different crime types, we can observe patterns within the dispatch data and apply this information to model the seasonal crime structure of areas in which we do not observe granular data.
For instance, we see dispatch data in Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, etc., and use this information to model seasonality in smaller areas at comparable latitude that exhibit similar weather patterns. Additionally, we utilize various economic and demographic variables to ensure strong area matches when modeling. The result of this effort is the ability to take annual crime data and infer the monthly structure across the country.
The Canada Pinkerton Crime Index incorporates a number of other statistic transformations described in previous blogs, including corrections for underreporting, severity weighting, and accounting for floating populations. Each neighborhood receives a risk score, reflecting how it compares to the national average and where it ranks relative to other neighborhoods in Canada. We offer unique crime scores for 54,619 neighborhoods across Canada, which represent approximately 99% of the country’s population. The areas of Canada that we do not produce crime scores tend to be areas with extremely low populations.
With availability now in US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Sweden, and Australia, the Pinkerton Crime Index allows you to understand crime across a multitude of areas, helping decision makers in industries such as real estate, finance, and manufacturing make informed decisions and anticipate coming challenges.
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