Not all crimes are equal in terms of their consequences for victims and the harm they cause to society. Yet, crime counts commonly used in research only consider the frequency of offenses and therefore lack precision. Some criminology scholars have recently popularized a method for estimating crime severity, which has the major advantage of not requiring additional data collection, as it relies on data already produced by the courts. In Canada, the strategy underlying the Crime Severity Index is to combine measures of crime frequency and severity to produce a single indicator. This article, however, argues for the development of a complementary indicator to standard crime frequency measures. After proposing a method of estimation based on the median of recorded offenses, the article contrasts temporal trends in offense frequency with trends in offense severity. Finally, an analysis of the geographic variations in the severity of recorded offenses across all municipal police organizations in Quebec and Sûreté du Québec detachments in 2023 is presented.
This fifty-ninth episode features an interview with Rémi Boivin.
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