Visualizing the Canadian Crime Severity Index

Work­ing with the Crime Sever­ity Index has been an inter­est­ing exer­cise. The data are avail­able through Sta­tis­tics Canada, which tracks police-reported crime sever­ity as well as the vol­ume of reported crimes. The Crime Sever­ity Index offers a sec­ondary mea­sure that helps us to under­stand more about the crimes com­mit­ted per Province. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, sever­ity of crime is not cor­re­lated with the vol­ume of crime com­mit­ted, but there are cer­tainly some out­liers. We inherit the inabil­ity to deter­mine whether or not these cor­re­la­tions actu­ally prove to be true when study­ing data aggre­gated to such a large (Provin­cial) extent. It is uneth­i­cal to assume that the aver­age Crime Sever­ity for a Province is dis­played through­out the entire Province itself. The illus­tra­tion below pro­vides a unique method of inves­ti­gat­ing mul­ti­vari­ate (multi-dimensional) sta­tis­tics. We can com­pare and con­trast the intra– and inter-provincial dif­fer­ences in the three inde­pen­dent vari­ables, Crime Sever­ity Index, Non-Violent Crime Sever­ity Index and Vio­lent Crime Sever­ity Index.

Zoomified!

Full res­o­lu­tion avail­able for down­load: HERE

By uti­liz­ing a stan­dard­ized unit of mea­sure, the “spokes” of one vari­able can be com­pared across all Provinces. There­fore, a spoke length mea­sur­ing 25% of the max­i­mum stan­dard­ized length (refer to the Index Key), would rep­re­sent 1/4 as much crime sever­ity as the max­i­mum sever­ity dis­played by that vari­able. As an exam­ple, the North­west Ter­ri­to­ries report about 9x greater vio­lent crime sever­ity than that reported in Ontario.

Let me know if I can improve upon the illus­tra­tion in any way!

Cheers!

More infor­ma­tion here: Crime Sever­ity Index via Sta­tis­tics Canada