While you’re four times more likely to have your laptop stolen in Bay ward than you are in Osgoode, you’re also almost seven times more likely to get it back.
An analysis of data from the City of Ottawa shows that the farther you live from the downtown core, the less likely the police are to solve a crime that you report.
The widest disparity is for thefts valued at $5,000 and less. In the city centre, the chances of police recovering your property hover between 35 and 50 per cent, with Bay ward tipping the scales at 53 per cent.
In the rural wards, theft solvency drops severely. In Osgoode, victims of theft have only an eight per cent chance of seeing their belongings again.
Those aren’t good odds, but city council candidates in the area say they aren’t overly concerned.
“Petty theft isn’t much of an issue in our ward. We don’t get a lot of it here because there aren’t any drug users stealing stuff to fence,” said Liam Maguire, a city council candidate for Osgoode.
“We’d like to see more police presence in terms of clamping down on speeding and traffic, but if you steal a laptop in Osgoode, you’re more likely to be caught by your neighbors than you are by the cops,” Maguire said.
Kim Sheldrick, another candidate for Osgoode, agreed.
“Some people do have that old country mentality that we look out for each other, but I’d like to see more patrols out here,” she said.
“Where I live, I’m much closer to the edge of the city limits than I am to downtown, so it’s not necessarily people from Ottawa who commit crimes here. It could be someone from out of town,” Sheldrick said.
The city’s police services board refused to comment on this story. The Ottawa Police did not return a request for comment by press time.
Minor theft accounts for around half of all the crime reported in Ottawa in a given year. Over all, property crime is decreasing in the city. There was a 16 per cent drop in thefts both over and under $5,000 in 2013, according to the Ottawa Police annual report.
Although occurring at much lower rates than minor theft, there’s also a wide discrepancy in the solvency rates of robbery between different areas of the city.
As Ottawa police chief Charles Bordeleau told the police services board last year, those crimes tend to increase in the springtime.
“The most frequently targeted items continue to be newer smartphones like iPhones,” Bordeleau said.
“Like they do every year (in the spring) many of our robberies have been occurring in high-traffic areas near school campuses, near bus routes, where people often use or check their devices,” he said.
Like the police success rate, the overall crime rate also drops the farther you get from the city centre. Typically there is a higher police presence in problem wards like Rideau-Vanier and River, where the crime rate is triple that of the rural areas. Having more police on hand in high-crime areas might help explain the discrepancy, said Jean Johnston-McKitterick, another candidate in Osgoode.
But Johnston-McKitterick said even with the low crime rates in rural wards, as the city grows, people will eventually have to give up some of their innocence.
“Lots of us leave our cars open because we are trusting,” Johnston-McKitterick said.
“But in June there was a group of kids going around stealing things from unlocked cars. Sometimes we’re a little behind on our first responders’ times, and I’d like to see that improved,” she said.