By Cecilia Nasmith
The Port Hope Police Services Board announces that the urban community in that municipality ranks quite favourably in the 2019 Crime Severity Index recently released by the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics.
Crime Severity Index refers to a measure of police-reported crime that takes into account the relative seriousness of individual offences and tracks changes in crime severity, the announcement explained.
It was first introduced in 2009, developed at the request of the policing community to address limitations to the traditional crime-rate statistics. Each criminal offence is given a relative weight, which is used to formulate the overall crime severity for each Canadian community.
The urban ward of Port Hope, with a population of 13,737, had an overall crime severity rate of 36.76 based on the combination of violent and non-violent crime. This ranked it 269th out of 321 communities, placing urban Port Hope among the safest in the province in terms of overall crime.
