Violent crime severity index up more than 15% in Windsor/Amherstburg

The crime severity index in Windsor and Amherstburg climbed between 2022 and 2023, according to a post on the Windsor Police Service's feed on X, formerly Twitter. 

But a professor of criminology at the University of Windsor is cautioning people against drawing many conclusions from the numbers.

The crime severity index is based on sentencing, Randy Lippert said.

And not all crimes lead to a sentence. 

"There's … so many … criminal acts, including some serious criminal acts, that just don't get either reported, or if they're reported, police don't proceed with them," Lippert said.

"If they are charged, they don't enter the courts because the charges are dismissed and so on."

Many crimes go uncounted

The violent crime severity index for Windsor and Amherstburg was up 15.5 per cent in 2023, according to the Windsor Police Service social media post.

The index sat at 93.6, exceeding the national average of 80.5 reported by Statistics Canada on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the crime severity index for the two municipalities increased by 4.8 per cent to 84.6, while the non-violent crime severity index increased by 0.6 per cent to 81.8 per cent.

The crime severity index measures changes in the severity of crime from year to year by assigning crimes a weight based on their seriousness, Windsor police explained. 

The level of seriousness is based on actual sentences handed down by the courts in all provinces and territories.

Last year's numbers were driven by higher numbers of robberies and assaults compared with 2022, police said.

Robberies were up 21 per cent, and assaults were up 16 per cent. Forty-five per cent of assaults were related to intimate partner violence — a number Lippert said seemed surprisingly low. 

Break and enters in the municipalities were down 12.7 per cent from 2022, police said. But fraud was up 28 per cent and shoplifting was up 24.8 per cent. 

Many factors influence numbers besides a rise in crime severity

But many things can influence those numbers besides an actual rise in the severity of crime, Lippert said.

Those include police and citizen campaigns to encourage the reporting of certain crimes and police decisions to step up enforcement of certain laws. 

Some people choose not to report crimes such as minor break and enters, Lippert said.

And members of vulnerable groups such as sex trade workers might also resist reporting crimes to police.

Changes at the level of the judiciary can also affect the severity index, Lippert said.

"It's quite possible that if the judiciary undergoes a lot of criticism for being too light on auto theft, for example … and they start handing out heavier sentences as a consequence, you know, it may well be because they don't like to be criticized, right?" he said. 

Lippert cautioned against organizations such as police departments using the data to argue for changes to police resources.

Numbers for the full census metropolitan area

"Because … there aren't those sort of one-to-one relationships between police numbers and crime," he said, "other than as you increase police, you tend to get more reported cases or more detected cases and so on."

The Windsor Police Service provides policing to both the City of Windsor and the Town of Amherstburg.

Statistics Canada data shows that the violent crime severity index for the entire Windsor census metropolitan area, which also includes LaSalle, Lakeshore and Tecumseh, was 64.2 in 2023 — up four per cent from 2022.  

LaSalle has its own police service, while Lakeshore and Tecumseh are served by Ontario Provincial Police. 

The crime rate for the census metropolitan area was 4,625 crimes per 100,000 people.

The rate is calculated based on Criminal Code incidents, excluding traffic offences, according to Statistics Canada.