Last year was a record-setter for homicides in Prince George and as 2024 winds down, the city has matched that sobering total.
Sort of.
In 2023 there were eight people killed within the city limits at the hands of another person.
This year there have been six homicides in the city and two in the surrounding area close to Prince George.
Either way, it’s been a bad year for Prince George RCMP homicide investigators, whether they work out of the downtown detachment or North District office.
“That’s high,” said Prince George RCMP Spt. Darin Rappel. “It’s consistent with last year and it’s probably contributing to our higher crime severity index.”
Although the RCMP are noticing an increased presence of Lower Mainland gang members moving into Prince George to a try to take a bigger share of the illicit drug trade, Rappel said that’s not the reason the homicide rate has hit record levels the past two years.
“I don’t want to lead anybody with the misapprehension that it’s a gang-violence thing at all,” he said. “Some of them are drug-related and some of them are not.”
By comparison, Calgary, a city of about 1.6 million, has had 17 homicides this year. With eight killings this year in the greater Prince George area out of a population of about 80,000, our homicide rate is considerably higher.
Rappel said the annual crime severity index which ranks Canadian cities according to the number and seriousness of violent crime now puts more weight on homicides, as compared to previous years, and that will likely be reflected when the 2024 figures are released sometime next spring.
The Prince George index rose sharply in 2019 to 250.76 (up 47.91 percent) but dropped to 227.14 in 2020, and hovered close to that in the following three years – 232.49 in 2021, 209.88 in 2022 and 233.10 in 2023.
“Having six homicides is definitely going to weight on the CSI and where it’s actually going to wash out we won’t know until they do all the numbers next year,” said Rappel. “It’s hard to go back in time to look at it because they’ve made modifications in how they do the crime severity index.
“What it does for me is demonstrate the workload for us. We’re high compared to other places and behind in others yet. If you have a high crime severity index you can be sure the members are more taxed than perhaps a detachment that has a low one. It’s a good indication it’s a busy place for cops.”
