City ranks high on Maclean's crime score

Prince George appears to be on track to earning the dubious honour of being Canada's most dangerous city for the third year in a row in an annual ranking by Maclean's magazine.

Although the issue is still to go to print, the national newsmagazine has posted numbers on its website that indicate the city will once again be in top spot.

A link on the magazine's home page entitled "Canada's Most Dangerous Cities" directs viewers to a page called "Where Canadian Criminals Go To Play." On that page, Maclean's has compiled Statistics Canada's 2011 crime severity index.

According to the graphic on the page, Prince George is B.C.'s highest crime city with a score of 159.47 The score is also the highest among the worst cities for each province and works out to being 105 per cent higher than the score for Canada as a whole of 77.62. Last year, Prince George's score was 114 per cent higher. In the interim, the city's ranking on the survey has declined noticeably for both crime in general and violent crime in particular.

However, the Statistics Canada study ranked 239 communities while Maclean's limited its survey to Canada's 100 largest.

The webpage also features a look at how cities fare for eight crimes on a per-capita basis and Prince George is ranked prominently in seven of them.

The magazine determined that Prince George was third highest in break and enters, fourth highest in sexual assault and in cannabis possession, fifth highest in impaired driving, seventh highest in aggravated assault, ninth highest in motor vehicle theft, and 14th highest in robbery.

The only category in which Prince George did not make the top 15 was homicides as the number of murder cases dropped from 10 in 2010 to one in 2011, according to Statistics Canada.

That total, in turn, was at odds with Prince George RCMP records, which show seven murders in 2010 and none in 2011. A Statistics Canada official has said that sometimes a homicide is brought to their attention in a different calendar year than the incident's date.

The city went 401 days without a homicide before a January house fire claimed the life of Jagdev Singh Jawanda. Frank William Edward Marion faces charges of manslaughter and criminal negligence causing death from that incident.

Mayor Shari Green and Prince George RCMP Supt. Eric Stubbs will speak to the media at city hall this afternoon about the Maclean's survey.