Yes and no. Municipal stats (and even more detailed ones) are very important when we're talking about crime rates. It is pointless to speak of MSA stats in Detroit, for example, because violent crime in Detroit is not remotely evenly distributed across the metro area.

In Canada, this urban-suburban gap is usually--not always, but usually--less marked, so it does indeed make sense to report by CMA as well. This is exactly the unit of analysis that Statcan uses. CMA, not municipality. But I still want to know the rates by municipality, because those are important.

ok I'm pretty sure these are really close to the actual statistics


1991 had 88 murders so back then it would have been 3.9/100k


2007 had 84 murders so that would be 3.3/100k


There isn't much of a difference

3.9 and 3.3 are pretty far apart when you're discussing this kind of thing. Thunder Bay is 2/100,000 so there goes my "Well in Toronto you're less likely to get murdered" explanation for the local knee jerk reactors. :(

21 so far in Vancouver I think.

At this rate, that would be 81 for the year, or a rate of: 3.2/100,000

My math is probably wrong... it's not my best subject. But nonetheless that seems actually pretty low considering how much everyone is freaking out about the murders so far this year. They're almost all gang related.

Compare that to the murder rate of American cities....
46 - Detroit
45 - Baltimore
40 - St. Louis
37 - Newark
31 - DC
30 - Oakland
etc
(these are from Wikipedia... could be wrong)

You are comparing Metro Vancouver, correct? Keep in mind that those stats from Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, etc are for the CITY. Those metro areas are full of suburbs with very low murder rates like we see here, so it's a little misleading (many Canadian cities include most of the suburban areas (Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Edmonton, etc) because you're taking what is essentially the inner-city of a city like Detroit, and comparing it against the entire Vancouver area.

For example, suppose Unicity had never occured in Winnipeg. Winnipeg had 28 murders last year spread over 650,000 people. The vast majority of these murders happened in only a few areas so the old city of Winnipeg where the murders occured (with its 200,000 people) would have had a murder rate around 3X what it currently is. (15 instead of 5 (or whatever it was last year)).

MSA stats for a city like Detroit (or Atlanta, DC, St Louis, etc) are worthless- they have the effect of outrageously exaggerating suburban murder rates and misrepresenting city murder rates to make them look far better than they actually are.

Well only 9 out of the 21 murders have been in the city of Vancouver....

22 now for metro van as man gunned down in surrey/langley

Calgary has 7 now following what now has turned out to be a guy getting murdered by one of his roommates last weekend. Initially police thought it wasn't a suspicious death but the medical examiner determined it was.

Greater Victoria is at 1.

which one is that?? I went to school with the girl who was pushed infront of the bus by the random drunk guy.

although it was last year i knew the guy who was killed down on store street aswell.

then i was at kingsway mall zellers and saw the mcleans article which states victoria as one of the safest places to be. Kinda shocking how since i moved to Edmonton, two people i know have been murdered. for the record i have been here just a little over 3 months.

It was announced on radio a little while ago that they caught him. This is number three for us, and there are still over eight months to go. :( That last in the article isn't a homicide but it was weird. A couple was driving to the west but got stuck here, so the man helped his wife kill herself. :shrug:

^The way that article worded it makes it sound like people would rather die than stay a night in Thunder Bay. :sly:

Knock on wood, we've had three homicides here in Halifax. Two of them were related to the drug war and well since the ring-leader is now out west for work and the other family's leader was killed it might start to settle down here. What is strange about this town is homicides come in groups of twos or threes. Normally theres two in January, none in the spring, one or two in the summer, and 1 or two in the late fall.

Based on my calculations Halifax has a homicide rate of 0.78 so far this year and a rate of 1.84 in 2008.

They obviously had other problems between them. It's still an unusual story.

There was a murder in Kenora. I think this brings Northwestern Ontario, with 235,000 people, to 6 homicides. (Three in Thunder Bay, one in Kenora, two on various First Nations.)

Looks like this is shaping up to be one of our worst years as far as homicide goes. :(

January 1: Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (Source)
January 15: Thunder Bay (1st) (Source)
January 23: Thunder Bay (2nd) (Source)
February 20: Kasabonika (Source)
March 21: Thunder Bay (3rd) (Source)
March 25: Kenora (Source)

Even if we don't get any more, that is a rate of 2.55/100,000, which I think is higher than the national average.

This would be the third homicide on a First Nation and seventh for NWO this year. Pikangikum is one of Canada's most impoverished communities, with an unemployment rate over 70%. It has the highest suicide rate of any community in the world.

Number 23 for Metro Vancouver

Man dies in Langley stabbing. Drug related

8 in the city of Calgary so far- if Van (city) is at 9 then it has a much higher rate than Calgary per capita. Vancouver proper is barely 600,000 people; Calgary proper is 1.1 million.

This is why we have to look at rates, not numbers, people.

Murders in Greater Vancouver
 

I think most of you are missing the point about the murders in Vancouver. The discussion should not be over how many or what boundaries you use to calculate the stats, the real point here is the degree to which the drug related murders are stepping out of the typical patterns as to how they are being committed.

Last year two innocent bystanders were killed in the GVA for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. One was a resident of the apartment complex and one was a plumber or gas fitter who was working in the apartment building at the time. Recently, one lady was shot with her young 4 year old son in the same car in the middle of the day. In Abbotsford, my co-worker had to duck in her car at an intersection in the middle of the afternoon while bullets were flying from the car beside her. Shots are flying at people due to road rage in Surrey. There are lots and lots of other examples. The drug war has hit the streets here in Vancouver. It is no longer in the dark rooms or the back alleys in the 'bad" part of the city. This is the real concern for me that you can be driving by and some drug war load will be in the next car and someone may open fire...

Montreal is still at 6

Toronto is still only at 11....very quiet month