Monday, the Ottawa Police Service put out its annual report for 2022
According to the most recent annual report from Ottawa police, a wide range of crime statistics, from calls for service to the severity of crimes, all went up in 2022.
The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) released its annual report for 2022 on Monday. The report gives an overview of statistics, such as calls for service, police response times, and programs and initiatives run by the police.
In a news release about the report, police said that the rise in crime was caused by the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and the beginning of a post-pandemic period.
“As we move away from the pandemic, it is important to show how similar these two times were,” says the statement. “As a result, several measures of public safety have gone up since last year.”
Report highlight
In 2022, there were nearly 4% more requests for service than in 2021, for a total of 370,000. Because of this increase, there were 8,600 more calls to the dispatch system and 4,700 more reports filed online.
The number of crimes reported in the city went up by 19% in 2022 compared to 2021. In total, 43,000 crimes were reported. This number doesn’t include traffic violations.
In 2022, the crime severity index for Ottawa went up by 12%. This is a measure that police say “reflects the relative seriousness of individual offenses and tracks changes in severity over time.”According to the police report, most of this increase can be explained by a rise in threats, assaults, robberies, and thefts.
The non-violent crime severity index, on the other hand, went up by 17%.
According to the report, the values for the OPS crime severity index are “estimates” and do not match the official Statistics Canada index with the same name. The report doesn’t give any more information about how the index is made.
OPS says that assaults, threats, and robberies are some of the reasons why the number of violent crimes reported went up by 6% in 2022.
In 2022, 26 percent more property crimes were reported to the police than they were in 2021. Thefts from cars, break-ins at businesses, and the total number of thefts, which includes shoplifting, all contributed to this rise.
Not every way to measure crime went up in 2022. The number of shootings reported in the city went down from 82 in 2021 to 60 last year, which is a 27% drop.
In 2022, there were 13 homicides in Ottawa with 15 victims. In 2021, there were 15 “occurrences” of homicide that police looked into.
Most crime statistics in the 2021 Ottawa police report showed an increase from the previous year.
Here is the full report for 2022:
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