Prince Albert’s Police Chief says like other communities across the country, the city is seeing more gun violence and gang activity and a big part of the solution is tackling the root causes of crime.

This, after the annual Crime Severity statistics were released for 2019 which puts Prince Albert in sixth place for overall crime in the country. Chief Jonathan Bergen says the Police Service has been involving community organizations to come up with solutions for the root causes, which include poverty, addictions, family welfare and gang violence.

Bergen adds that the crime severity numbers are a bit misleading because it doesn’t include the population of the surrounding area and all the people that come into Prince Albert for services. That means the numbers are tabulated using a population of around 70,000 when in reality, the shopping statistics indicate about 190,000 people utilizing city services. That skews the per capita information.