Mayor Shari Green went on the offensive Thursday in advance of an upcoming issue of Maclean's magazine that will designate Prince George as Canada's most dangerous city for the third year in a row.
With Prince George RCMP Supt. Eric Stubbs, Green held a press conference at city hall in which she emphasized the ranking comes in marked contrast to an assessment Statistics Canada released this past summer.
According to Statistics Canada's annual crime severity index, Prince George stood at 14th for crime in general and violent crime in particular in 2011, down from seventh and 11th respectively for 2010.
Those rankings are out of 239 communities with populations of 10,000 people or greater.
Maclean's uses the same numbers to do its rankings, but limited the comparison to Canada's 100 largest cities.
The news is not all bad for Prince George, according to a copy of the story Green was able to obtain in advance of its publication and handed out to the media Thursday. The city's score dropped from 114 per cent above the national average in 2010 to 105 per cent in 2011, the magazine noted.
But that was small consolation for Green who was left puzzled by a headline in a related story - "Getting away with murder" - given that there were no murders in the city throughout all of 2011.
"It's kind of a tough pill to swallow," Green said.
The same cities that made the top 10 last year are on this year's list, she noted.
"What that tells me is we're all moving towards improvement in dealing with crime," Green said. "So if Maclean's chooses to land a filter on top of the Statscan numbers, we're all going to look the same the next year and the year after that, regardless of the impact that we're making."
Asked if she thought Maclean's methodology is unfair, Green limited her comments to saying it's their way of presenting the information.
"Obviously, we're not going to put a big Excel spreadsheet up on the front lawn of city hall," she said. "We've got a positive story to tell and we need to continue to support the RCMP and the work they're doing in this community."
Stubbs, meanwhile, stated flatly that Prince George is not the most dangerous city in Canada and contrasted Prince George's zero murders in 2011 with totals elsewhere.
"Edmonton had 50, Toronto had 86, Montreal had 54," he said. "These three large Canadian cities didn't make Maclean's top 10 list. When Canadians think about the most dangerous city in Canada, a community that didn't have a homicide would not likely be on their list."
Those living high risk lifestyles have a high probability of being a victim of a criminal act, Stubbs continued, "however, the incidents of random violence for those citizens that contribute positively to our community is relatively low and the community needs to know that - this is a safe community."
He outlined three crime reduction initiatives RCMP have launched, one that has resulted in the arrest of 40 prolific offenders since April 1, another that has driven down the crime rate and calls for service in the downtown core, and the start of a new domestic violence unit in July that's assisting some of the city's most at-risk victims.
"Whether this community is ranked first or 14th in Canada, both the mayor and I know we have a long way to go to achieve meaningful and sustained change in Prince George," Stubbs said. "However I have seen some of the positive results that some of our initiatives have yielded. This is a credit to our hardworking RCMP employees and our community partners that include city hall, the province and a host of non-profit organizations."
