Analysis of Violent and Weapons Crime in the City of Ottawa, 2012-2016 /

Thus, 2016 was not an exceptionally violent year for the City of Ottawa, despite the increase in the number of homicides and public perception of violence in the city. [...] In order to calculate the index, crimes are weighted based on a score taken from two factors: incarceration rate for the type of offence and average prison sentence for the type of crime.9 The City of Ottawa follows the national trend for the Violent Crime Severity Index. [...] The only comparable increase seen in the past five years is in the number of recorded incidents of discharging of a weapon with intent, which surged by 375.0 per cent from 2013 to 2014.15 The rate of the violent crime variables, or the number of people affected by the crime out of every 100,000 persons in the City of Ottawa, also increased significantly from 2015 to 2016 (see Table 2). [...] Because three of the four variables chosen for this study necessarily involve the use of weapons in the commission of the crime they only capture a small percent of all violent crimes committed in the City of Ottawa. [...] There was no statistically significant relationship or generalizable correlation between the number of violent crimes in the City of Ottawa and the number of incidents of the four crime variables (homicides, assault (level 2), discharge of a firearm with intent, and using a firearm in the commission of a crime).18 Given that all four crime variables increased in number from 2015 to 2016, and so to