The seriousness of crimes recorded by the police

Lunchtime lecture by Rémi Boivin.
Monday, February 10, 2025, from 11:45 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
In co-modal: in room C-1017-11, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, at the Université de Montréal and online.

Registration required for Zoom.

Face-to-face places registration.

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Summary:

The number of police-recorded crimes in Canada has been rising for about a decade, with the result that some people feel less safe today than they did 10 years ago. Statistics Canada's Seriousness Index has highlighted the fact that not all crimes are equal, giving greater weight, for example, to murders than to robberies. The agency's strategy of calculating a single indicator is imperfect, however, since it takes into account both the frequency and the seriousness of crimes. The purpose of this presentation is to compare two indicators that summarise only the seriousness of offences recorded by the police, which are complementary to the frequency of crime already well documented by Statistics Canada. Using data released by the agency, these two severity indicators are calculated for 161 Quebec regions for the period 2005-2022, making it possible to check whether places where crime is frequent (for example, large cities) are also those where the severity of offences is high.

Biography :

Rémi Boivin

Full professor at the School of Criminology of the Université de Montréal and regular researcher at the International Centre of Comparative Criminology. He teaches courses on crime analysis and the sociology of crime.