Public data is something worth reading carefully and connecting it to actual governance during election cycles.
It becomes harder to dismiss and more useful for residents who actually live with the numbers. Robbery volume fell 39% while clearance halved - this is an illustration of the capacity problem.
The Crime Stats Nobody Reads
(And What They're Actually Hiding)
Ottawa Police quietly drops a "Crime Trends" dashboard for every ward each spring. It's built for city hall, not for you. Here's the version with the headlines nobody wrote.
Every spring, Ottawa Police publishes a Crime Trends report for each ward — rows of rates and clearance percentages that read like a tax form. Which is exactly why nobody looks closely enough to notice what it actually says about Rideau-Rockcliffe. So I did.
The number everyone will quote Headline
Crime in Rideau-Rockcliffe rose 9.0% in 2025. That's the number that'll show up in a press release or a doorstep conversation. It's also the least interesting number in the report.
The number nobody will quote Buried
Not "robbery went up" — it actually fell 39%, down to 20 cases. What collapsed is our ability to solve the ones that still happen. Same story with assault: clearance down from 54.0% to 48.7%. Violent crime overall dropped 6.4% in raw terms — genuinely good news — while our capacity to clear the violent crimes that remain got measurably worse.
That's not a "more crime" story. That's a capacity story. And capacity is a council-level, budget-level, oversight-level question — exactly the kind of question Rideau-Rockcliffe hasn't been asking loudly enough.
So where's the 9% actually coming from? Trace it
Not from violence. It's coming from two places, and neither is what you'd guess from the headline.
Clearance: just 9.9%
Clearance: just 5.0%
Failure to Comply w/ Order
Theft under $5,000 is the single largest driver of the entire increase — bike thefts, package thefts, scams — and it's the crime category solved least often. Fraud is close behind, solved barely one time in twenty. Meanwhile "Other Criminal Code" offences are up 34.1%, driven almost entirely by Failure to Comply with a Court Order and Breach of Probation — not new crimes on our streets, but the justice system's own machinery grinding on people already inside it.
The chart that should worry you more than the headline 5-year view
Ottawa Police also publish a five-year Crime Severity Index for the ward. It sat basically flat from 2021 to 2023, ticked up gently into 2024 — and then jumped 11% in a single year to 82.68. Severity isn't volume; it's a measure of how serious the offences are getting. A line that goes from flat to a hockey stick in its final year belongs on a council agenda, not buried on page two of a PDF.
Where this connects to how the ward is governed Accountability
We already know the Ottawa Police Services Board's own Chief admitted its database-misuse auditing isn't "robust." We already know the Board's safe-workplace budget was cut from $8.2M to $5.4M since 2022. We already know Rawlson King sat on that Board and resigned in 2022 vouching for its competence — before the Auditor General found it had been reporting inaccurately.
None of that is a coincidence sitting next to a ward where violent-crime clearance is falling and property-crime clearance is in single digits.
Oversight isn't an abstract governance word. It's the difference between a robbery getting solved four times out of ten versus two times out of ten. That's not a statistic — that's someone's stolen car, someone's break-in, sitting open.
What actually needs to happen The ask
Not more press releases about "crime being up." A ward councillor who treats a 9.9% property-crime clearance rate as an actual problem to solve — pushing for resourcing tied to outcomes, not just calls answered. Take a Board seat the incumbent no longer holds...because he quit.
The data's public. It's just never been read out loud. So, how will Rideau-Rockcliffe’s clearance rates be tracked and improved in 2026–27? If you want improvements... I am your man!
References / Sources
- Ottawa Police Service – Crime Trends by City Ward (interactive dashboard; primary source for 2024–2025 Ward 13 figures, clearance rates, and Crime Severity Index)
- Ottawa Police Community Safety Data Portal
- CTV News Ottawa – Crime rates by ward in 2025 (confirms ~9% rise in Rideau-Rockcliffe rate)
- Ottawa Citizen – Ottawa crime rates increase in 2025
- CBC News – Ottawa police clearance rate dropping
- CBC News – Auditor General audit on OPS project budgets and reporting (May 2026)
- CBC News – Police board meeting on database misuse auditing and workplace safety (June 2026; Chief’s “not robust” comment)
- Ottawa Citizen – Rawlson King resignation from Police Services Board (2022)
- Ottawa Police – Sample Ward 13 Crime Trends PDF (methodology reference; earlier years)
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