City council is looking for new benchmarks and measures to gauge community safety, while moving away from trying to get Maclean’s magazine’s approval.
While the move comes the same year a change in the magazine’s calculation for determining the safest cities in Canada pushed the city further down the list, Mayor Nolan Crouse insists the two are not related.
“We have been talking about how we deal with policing and community crime for quite some time and now it is a matter of taking it to the next level.”
The magazine began its ranking system three years ago and after two finishes in the top 10 in the previous two years, the city slid to 31st last year.
In 2009 council made it part of its priorities to finish within the top five in Canada as a measure of community safety.
The new council priorities released last week take the emphasis off that ranking and instead set a goal of creating a new benchmark related to community safety against which the city can measure itself.
Crouse said the magazine’s rankings might continue to be a city target, but he wants to take a better look.
“I wouldn’t say we have moved away from the goal of being in the top five but we have to be sure we are measuring the right things.”
He said they used the benchmark before because it was available and now they need to see what else might be out there.
“It is the only benchmark that we had. It might still be the right benchmark years ahead, but let’s step back and look at it.”
This year’s decline had very little to do with changes in the city’s overall crime rate, but instead a change in how the magazine calculates the safest city.
Whereas previously the magazine focused on a set of specific crimes — mostly violent offences — they broadened the survey in 2010 to include all crime.
Coun. Cathy Heron said she believes the city needs an index based more on what is important to residents here.
“If we want to be able to track ourselves and how we are doing on crime and prevention and how we are getting good value for money with the investment in the RCMP, we thought we needed a little bit more of a made-in-St. Albert index.”
Heron said a ranking comparing the city to itself and tracking the direction of safety in the community would be more important.
“We will look at the crimes we get and sort of rank them on severity and then we will have a benchmark from year to year and can honestly say that we are doing well or we have to improve.”
RCMP Insp. Warren Dosko said finding a new way to track community safety will likely involve pulling in information about response times, traffic accidents and crime to fully understand trends.
“The key is coming up with a combination of measures, so not working on any particular one, but coming up with a mix,” he said. “You need a measure, there has to be some sort of accountability; are we getting better or are we getting worse.”
Dosko said a good measure has to compare the city both against itself and against other communities to get the full picture.
“You have to do both if you are really going to be effective.”
He said developing the new measure will likely take several months, but he hopes it will help residents better understand the local situation.
Neither Crouse nor Heron know precisely what they would like to see in the new measure.
Crouse said he would like to have some assessment of the detachment’s clearance rate — the measure of crimes being solved — as part of the new measure.
“That is one of the things I think we should be spending some time on, if we have crimes are we solving them?”
