iN NUMBERS: What the stats say about crime in Kamloops, Okanagan

Every year the whole country gets a huge dump of crime statistics which are often used to make sensational headlines about crime across Canada, including in Kamloops and the Okanagan.

Numbers don’t really capture the whole story, but it’s still important to keep an eye on them.

In Kamloops, Kelowna and Penticton the numbers are showing an improvement over the course of the past few years while Vernon’s crime rate is the highest it has been in the past five years, but not by much.

Statistics Canada measures crime in two ways. The first is the crime rate, which is just the number of incidents per 100,000 people. Then there’s Crime Severity Index which is calculated for larger metropolitan areas.

Crime Severity Index is a way to weigh how serious crimes are in a given city. Each crime is given a score, for example the score for murder is 8,200 and property theft has a score of 29. The index uses these scores to calculate an average.

Here are the numbers:

• 103.68: That’s Kelowna’s Crime Severity Index for 2025, down from a five-year high of 126.03 in 2022.
• 126.22: That’s Kamloops’ Crime Severity Index for 2025, down a five-year high of 165.29 in 2023.
• 10,914: That’s Kelowna’s municipal crime rate for 2025. It has been on a steady decline since 14,147 in 2021.
• 12,602: That’s Kamloops’ municipal crime rate for 2025. It’s up slightly from 12,027 in 2024, but still lower than the five-year high of 15,388 in 2022.
• 14,198: That’s Vernon’s municipal crime rate in 2025, the highest it has been in the past five years. In 2021 it was slightly lower at 14,164.
• 7,032: That was the number of actual crime incidents in Vernon in 2025.
• 14,179: That’s Penticton’s municipal crime rate for 2025. It has been on a steady decline from 20,619 in 2021.
• 5,550: That was the number of actual crime incidents in Penticton in 2025.
• 4: That was the number of homicides in Kamloops and Kelowna in 2025, a tie.