Most Montrealers Feel Safe Walking Solo At Night Despite Widespread Belief That Crime Is Up
According to a survey. 👀
Montreal skyline at night.
No wonder Montreal was named the safest city in the world to travel to earlier this year. The Angus Reid Institute (ARI) has released a survey of Canadians' perceptions of crime in their communities and the findings for Montreal justify the title.
According to a survey, residents of Montreal (72%) are among the Canadians who say they're most likely to feel safe walking around alone in their city at night, along with people in Saskatoon (74%) and the 905 area code of Toronto (73%).
This dominant feeling of safety on our island could be explained by low exposure to crime on an individual level: only 8% of the Montrealers surveyed said they have been victims of a criminal offence in the past two years. This number is quite reassuring considering that, according to the ARI, "one in five who live in Vancouver (21%), Edmonton (20%), Regina (22%), Saskatoon (18%) and Winnipeg (19%) say they have been the victim of a police-reported crime."
However, the results also revealed that 65% of the respondents living in the 514 feel that crime in their neighbourhood has risen in the past five years. Provincewide, the figure is only 45%. 39% of Quebecers, meanwhile, believe that there has been "no change" in crime levels, "the most of any region in the country," the ARI states.
The institute cites Statistics Canada's Crime Severity Index (CSI) to show that Quebec has some of the lowest levels of reported crime in Canada.
The situation is different in other provinces. "Across the country," the Angus Reid Institute writes, "more than half in every province except Quebec believe crime is rising in their community."
The ARI survey reached 5,014 Canadians between September 14 and 15.
