A key Vancouver crime metric hit an all-time low last year, and the Vancouver Police Department expects to set another record by the end of 2026. While the VPD has pointed to recent investments and initiatives as key drivers of the impressive declines in crime the city has seen over the last decade, data analysis from CTV News shows much of the progress toward the 2025 low point was achieved well before those initiatives began. Indeed, the largest single-year drop in Vancouver’s Crime Severity Index during the last decade came in a year when the police budget was essentially frozen and VPD brass was asking the province to intervene and increase funding. The numbers look good for the VPD Earlier this month, the VPD held a news conference to share data on long-term crime trends in the city. The event drew some criticism for its timing, coming as it did nine days before the date of the municipal election. Senior Deputy Chief Const. Howard Chow told reporters the data sharing was necessary to counter what he described as misrepresentation of VPD data in recent months. Chow argued the VPD wants the public to have a clearer picture of crime trends, including the distinction between long-term changes and increases in some categories this year. “We are making progress,” Chow said in a news release accompanying the data. “It’s not an accident. It’s not a coincidence. It’s because the VPD is policing effectively and investing in the right technologies and policing strategies like Project Barrage and the creation of District 5 to address public safety concerns.” Given that assertion—and the fact that the two strategies mentioned by name began in 2025 and therefore could not have contributed to the longer-term trend—CTV News decided to review the last decade of police budgets to determine the extent to which municipal investment in policing has correlated to declining crime rates. The period under consideration is 2016 through 2025, 10 years the VPD highlighted in its news release for their substantial decline in the Crime Severity Index. “The CSI is important because it takes into account the severity of crimes, and doesn’t equate, for example, a shoplifting incident with a violent robbery,” the VPD release reads, describing the metric as “Statistics Canada’s preferred method” of reporting crime trends. In 2025, Vancouver had its lowest overall CSI on record, since tracking began in 1998. It also had the lowest non-violent CSI on record, and the VPD attributed the lack of a record low in the violent CSI to the Lapu-Lapu Day attack, which resulted in 11 second-degree murder charges. “The most severe types of crime are down and the VPD is projecting all three CSI categories will drop through 2026 to the lowest ever recorded levels,” the department said in its release. In 2016, the overall Crime Severity Index in Vancouver was 114.83. In 2025, it was 89.28, a 22.3-per-cent decrease from 2016. The CSI for non-violent crime fell even further over the period, from 120.91 to 86.45—a 28.5-per-cent drop. The CSI for violent crime fluctuated over the 10-year period, but ended up roughly where it started, going from 97.18 in 2016 to 98.24 in 2025, an increase of 1.1 per cent. This is the increase the VPD attributes to Lapu-Lapu Day. It’s also the only CSI metric on which Vancouver’s crime rate is comparable to the national average. The VPD cited national CSI figures in its news release, highlighting that Vancouver’s overall rate has declined by 22.3 per cent since 2016, while Canada’s grew by 4.2 per cent. It should be noted, however, that Vancouver has had higher overall and non-violent CSIs for the entire 10-year period, even though its rates have improved drastically while Canada’s have been more static. In other words, while crime in Vancouver is the least severe it has ever been, according to this metric, crime remains more severe in Vancouver than it is, on average, across the country. In a statement to CTV News for this article, Chow reiterated the figures about Vancouver’s CSIs declining while the national numbers have been increasing. He didn’t directly answer a question about whether the VPD’s goal is to get its numbers below the national average. “Of course, the department is always working toward protecting public safety to the best of its ability,” Chow said. “Those efforts are naturally reflected in the CSIs. The VPD’s strategies will continue to be developed and tactics deployed to address long-term crime trends and immediate issues.” Budget growing at twice the rate of inflation Between 2016 and 2025, the amount the City of Vancouver allocated to the VPD in its annual budget book grew from $274.9 million to $455.8 million. The approved amount in the 2026 budget book is $525.3 million. These figures represent the amounts approved by city councils during their budget process, not the final amount spent by the VPD, which has typically exceeded the amount budgeted. Overall, the VPD budget increased by $180.9 million during the 10 years from 2016 to 2025. That’s a 65.8-per-cent increase. The average police budget during the period grew by 5.8 per cent, roughly double the average rate of inflation over those 10 years, which was 2.9 per cent. Police spending also far outpaced population growth in the City of Vancouver from 2016 through 2025, which averaged about 1.6 per cent per year, according to B.C. Stats estimates. In other words, Vancouver has been increasing its investment in policing, relative to external factors, since 2016—but has it been getting good value for its investment? Implicit in Chow’s statements is that it has. The investments he cites are part of VPD budgets that have risen significantly in recent years, and that growing expenditure is happening at the same time that the city’s overall Crime Severity Index is the lowest it’s ever been. The deputy chief was more direct in drawing this link in his statement to CTV News. “Effective policing combined with proper funding is the reason for the city’s record-low crime rates,” Chow said. “It’s not one or the other, as you appear to be suggesting. The VPD is on track to record the LOWEST EVER CSI across all areas in 2026. This reflects what a police department can do when it is properly funded and deploying effective policing strategies, as the VPD has done and will continue to do.” The progress Vancouver has made on reducing crime has not been linear throughout the 10 years between 2016 and 2025. Nor has the growth in the police budget over that time. The largest spending increases have occurred since 2022, while the most significant decreases in Crime Severity Index scores happened before that year, and largely coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. The ABC effect Soon-to-be-former mayor Ken Sim’s A Better City Vancouver party has been closely associated with the Vancouver Police Department from its inception. Sim’s signature campaign promise in 2022 was to hire 100 additional police officers and 100 nurses in an effort to address street disorder and mental health issues in the city—particularly in the Downtown Eastside. The Vancouver Police Union endorsed Sim in that election—the first and, to date, only time it has made an endorsement in a municipal campaign. In every election that ABC has appeared on a ballot in Vancouver, it has fielded a council candidate who is a current or former employee of the VPD. Given the close affinity between ABC and the VPD—a relationship political scientist Stewart Prest called “unusual” in an interview with CTV News earlier this year—it’s worth looking at budget and crime severity data before and after Sim and his party took office. Police budgets from 2016 through 2022 were set by councils controlled by other parties, while budgets in 2023, 2024 and 2025 were set by Sim and ABC. Between 2016 and 2022, the VPD budget grew by $92 million, from $274.9 million to $366.9 million. Over ABC’s three budgets, the amount allocated to the VPD has grown from $366.9 million to $455.8 million, an increase of $88.9 million. The VPD budget grew nearly as much in three years under Sim as it had in the previous seven. As a reminder, those are the numbers approved during council budget consultations. The VPD’s actual spending in 2025 came in at $479.1 million, in part due to increases council approved to fund the District 5 and Task Force Barrage initiatives. The surge in spending since ABC took office has not corresponded to a significant drop in Vancouver’s overall Crime Severity Index. In 2022, when Kennedy Stewart was mayor for the first 10 months, Vancouver’s overall CSI was 91.64. In 2025, after three years of major increases to the VPD budget, Vancouver’s overall CSI was 89.28. It’s a similar story for the non-violent CSI, which went from 86.89 in 2022 to 86.45 in 2025. The violent-crime specific index shows considerably more movement. In 2022, it was 105.46—the high point in the 10-year sample—and by 2025 it had come down to 98.24. As mentioned previously, however, the 2025 figure is a slight increase from where the violent CSI stood a decade ago in 2016, when Gregor Robertson was mayor and the VPD budget was just $274.9 million. Correlation is not causation. There’s no reason to believe that the smaller budget of 2016 caused the lower violent Crime Severity Index that year. There’s also no reason to believe that Stewart and the council at the time limiting the VPD budget to a modest 0.4-per-cent increase in 2021—as part of a broader belt-tightening prompted by pandemic-related revenue losses—caused a major drop-off in crime severity that year, though such a drop-off did occur. In the year 2021—when the VPD appealed the council’s budget to the province, arguing it was inadequate to safely police the city—Vancouver saw its largest single-year decline in the overall crime severity index during the 10-year period under review here. The CSI went from 104.8 in 2020 to 92.19 in 2021, an 11.4-per-cent drop in a year when the police budget was essentially frozen. The VPD responds Asked about these observations on CSI and budget trends, Chow described the pandemic as “an important factor” that CTV News had failed to consider in its analysis. “Why is this important? Consider that in 2019 the VPD reported 16,498 thefts from motor vehicles, then the pandemic hit in 2020 and the number dropped to 9,884,” the deputy chief said. “Less people were out and about during the pandemic so there were less vehicle targets.” Chow asserted that 2022 “becomes the new benchmark” for crime stats as the year when most pandemic-related restrictions ended. “Because your question specifies what council did in 2021 and you’re asking about investments to the VPD, then it is logical to consider what investments council made to the VPD since 2022,” Chow said. “All three CSI figures have decreased between 2022 and 2025.” He did not directly address the part of the question that asked why the decrease was smaller between 2022 and 2025 than it had been in the years immediately before that, though it’s clear that COVID was a key driver of that decrease. A follow-up question suggesting that the large drop in CSIs during COVID indicates that crime is affected by a lot of factors besides police strategies and investment did not receive a response. ‘The data speaks for itself’ CTV News asked Chow for examples of investments the VPD has made in policing technologies and strategies, as well as any research the department has conducted to establish a causal relationship between these investments and declining crime rates. Chow said the VPD has invested “both financially and operationally” in hundreds of special investigative projects and task forces responding to emerging crime trends over the multiple decades since the Crime Severity Index was first created in 1998. “That is effective policing,” he said. “The department has also invested across all of its operations in cutting-edge technologies, such as software platforms and investigative tools, CCTV, new vehicles and vessels, drones, crucial officer training, recruitment, community outreach and relationships, and in many, many other areas. Those are investments. Taken together, those investments and effective policing combined have all added to the department’s ability to prevent, combat and investigate crime, thereby contributing to lower crime rates and record-low CSI.” Chow enumerated more than a dozen specific projects and technology investments the department has made since 2022, and responded to the request for research on causation by saying: “Respectfully, we believe the data speaks for itself.” “There is persuasive empirical evidence that the violent crime reductions achieved in 2025 were attributable at least in part to the Retail Crime Task Force and Task Force Barrage initiatives,” Chow’s statement continues. “In particular, the timing of the crime reductions in the Downtown Eastside coincided with Task Force Barrage (February 2025 and thereafter) and its predecessor Project Brighthaven (December 2024/January 2025).” Chow also cited an enforcement project called Task Force Agility and an investigative project called Project Reclaim, which both took place in 2022. “We now know that these VPD projects coincided with (and plausibly resulted in) a decrease in the rate of unprovoked stranger assaults,” he said. CTV News has previously reported on the decline in these types of attacks in Vancouver, which spiked during the early pandemic. The decline began in 2021 and continued through 2022, but data was not made public until 2023, after a municipal election in which public safety was a major issue and some candidates continued to cite dated statistics about 4.5 random attacks happening each day. A 2023 analysis from the VPD found the spike was likely caused by a combination of pandemic-related “mental health pressures” and the fact that empty streets provided “increased opportunities for violence.” The decline was credited to factors including the “return to pre-pandemic daily routines” leading to “more pedestrians and increased guardianship within public spaces.” The report does not mention the VPD initiatives Chow named. Research on police spending A researcher who has studied the relationship between police budgets and crime rates cautions against assuming that the correlation between all-time high spending and all-time low crime severity is “causal.” “Without a rigorous evaluation that shows the effectiveness of specific policing interventions or investments, you can’t really tie those projects to the crime rate,” said Melanie Seabrook, a public health systems researcher at Upstream Lab in Toronto. In November 2023, she was the lead author of a paper that looked at police budgets in 20 of Canada’s largest municipalities, including Vancouver, and compared them with local crime rates. She said the research team’s initial desire was to look at the impact of police funding on health, but found that “very little research” on police budgets exists in Canada, in general, and decided that a more preliminary study on police spending and its relationship to crime rates would be beneficial for future research. “We didn’t see a consistent relationship between Crime Severity Index and police funding,” she said, summarizing the study’s findings. “Even just looking at the trends, you can see where some municipalities have had a very flat police budget and still saw a reduction in crime. Some have seen an increasing police budget and an increasing Crime Severity Index trend.” Seabrook also noted that it’s common for police departments to “take either argument” to increase their budgets. If crime rates are increasing, they ask for more money to combat the trend, whereas if crime rates are decreasing, they cite the trend as evidence that investment is working and should continue. “Obviously, these are conflicting arguments,” she said. “From our research and from broader research across Canada, there hasn’t been any consistent evidence that police budgets directly impact crime rates over time. There’s much stronger evidence in the literature for funding other types of social services and supports, and their relationship to crime reduction over time.” Officers, not budgets Chow pushed back on Seabrook’s research, citing a study led by Simon Fraser University criminology professor Martin A. Andresen that revisited her team’s data and challenged its methodology. Chow also provided CTV News with links to several U.S.-based academic studies that concluded specific police operations that increased the presence of officers in a given area contributed to decreases in crime. One report shared by Chow, which was created for the Obama administration in 2016, summarized the available research in that country by saying, “expanding resources for police has consistently been shown to reduce crime.” “Estimates from economic research suggest that a 10 per cent increase in police force size decreases crime by three to 10 per cent,” the report reads, before going on to note that a 10 per cent increase in high school graduation rate has been shown to correlate with a nine per cent drop in arrest rates and a 10 per cent increase in wages for non-college-educated men leads to a 10 to 20 per cent decrease in crime rates. In the SFU study, Andresen and his team reproduce Seabrook’s analysis using a different statistical technique, finding that the “overall conclusion” that spending and crime rates are not correlated “appears to be justified.” However, the researchers then perform the same analysis using a larger dataset available through Statistics Canada: the number of police officers per capita. Since officer salaries typically account for 80 to 90 per cent of police budgets, the study notes, this dataset may function as a proxy for the relationship between spending and crime Seabrook and her team were investigating. Of the 20 municipalities reviewed, 15 had statistically significant correlations between officers per capita and crime rates, with 12 of those correlations being negative, meaning more officers corresponded to less crime. “If any relationship exists between police per capita and the CSI, it is negative,” the researchers conclude, before going on to note the contradictory justifications for increasing police spending that Seabrook highlighted. “Increases in police presence are usually accepted to (potentially) decrease crime,” the study reads. “This relationship is supported in the context of place-based police interventions (e.g., hot spot policing) in the United States and Canada … However, if there is a positive relationship, this is usually explained as being the result of increased spending on police (literally spending or higher police per capita rate) because of high or increasing crime. In other words, the theoretical relationship between policing and crime is explained no matter which relationship is found.” Andresen and his team also note that “crime is only a portion of what police deal with” due to “the defunding of the social service over the last four decades.” “More recent research in this area shows that approximately 20-30 per cent of police calls for service relate to crime-related calls,” the study reads. “Consequently, using crime rates as a performance metric for policing is limiting, at best, and problematic, at worst.”
