Prepared by Police Services, Ministry of the Attorney General. Adobe Acobat Reader free. For national crime rates, the multiplier is 100,000. For example, the average provincial crime rate for motor vehicle theft in 1995 was 8 per 1000 residents. Police reports of crime are generated from incidents reported by the public.
Crime rates are crude indicators of the amount of law-breaking in society.
This is because their unit of analysis is a founded report of crime to the police by the public. Some criminologists argue that crime rates provide a fair picture of the temporal and spatial patterns of crime, although they may be inaccurate in an absolute sense. Given that crime rates are dependent upon the public reporting crime, some rates more accurately represent the actual amount of crime in society. For example, most murders come to the attention of the police, as do car thefts. According to Canadian victimization studies, some crimes are notoriously under-reported, including serious offences like robbery and sexual assault.