gambling in alberta - Research Services - University of Lethbridge

the entire file was read to ascertain a) whether the incident was gambling related or not, b) the
type of incident, and, c) details of the incident. As a reference point, the number of total
reported offences as a function of year and offence type were obtained for Lethbridge and
Medicine Hat. The data for Lethbridge was taken from the Lethbridge Regional Police Services
annual reports posted on their website. The data for Medicine Hat was provided directly by the
Medicine Hat Police Service. Incident occurrence data can be broken down into 5 general
categories: a) Crimes against Persons (e.g., murder, robbery, assault, domestic violence, etc.),
b) Crimes against Property (e.g., break and enter, theft, fraud, etc.), c) Vice Crimes (gaming,
liquor, drugs, prostitution, etc.), d) Criminal Code Traffic Violations (impaired operation of
motor vehicle, refusal to provide breath sample, hit and run, etc.), and e) Other (incidents that
are not criminal in nature, but still require police assistance (e.g., attempted suicide, child
neglect/abandonment, breach of probation).
The results of this investigation are presented below in Table 51, with the results for Lethbridge
at the top, Medicine Hat in the middle, and the combined communities at the bottom. These
figures indicate a few things. First, that consistent with expectation, the most common type of
gambling-related incident is property related, accounting for 48.7% (184/378) of all cases.
Second, consistent with some other indices of problem gambling examined in other sections of
this report, the number of gambling-related incidents in recent years appears to be somewhat
lower than earlier years. Third, the rate of overall gambling-related incidents is quite low,
representing only 0.6% of all incident reports (378/64280).
This low rate of occurrence is similar to what was found by Smith, Wynne, & Hartnagel (2003) in
their examination of Edmonton police records for 2001 using a very similar methodology.
These investigators found a 2.7% rate (338/11198) 84 among the files they examined.
Presumably, the 2.7% rate is higher than our 0.6% rate primarily because Smith et al. (2003)
only searched for gambling-related incidents in crime categories that were deemed to be most
likely to contain these events, 85 as opposed to the examination in all categories as was done in
the present study (thus, their rate would be lower if their denominator was the total number of
incidents in all categories in 2001). This does not negate the possibility that there may also be
true differences between the rates due to different time periods and different communities
(both of which might favour higher rates in the Smith, Wynne, & Hartnagel (2003) study).
To help gauge the degree of underestimation of gambling-related incidents in the police
records, a comparison was made between the number of incidents of gambling-related
domestic violence and illegal acts in the police records for the years 2008 and 2009,
compared to the number of reported instances in the Lethbridge and Medicine Hat Targeted
population surveys for 2008 and 2009. In the police records there are only 8 cases of
84 338 is an estimated number that combines the 234 cases that were identified among the 5196 files, plus 104
cases projected to occur in the 6002 files that were not examined.
85 Murder, Attempted Murder, Manslaughter, Extortion, Robbery, Counterfeiting, Fraud, Betting house, Gaming
House, Other Gaming & Betting, Organized Crime Occurrence, Cocaine Trafficking, Suicides, Attempted Suicides,
Family Disputes.
188