Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That's a big question. I'll do my best to keep my answers short.
So the most recent information we have is from the 2021 calendar year, and that shows us actually a decrease in crime during that time. The total crime rate went down by 3 percent in the Northwest Territories driven by a reduction in robbery, a 21 percent decrease in drug offences, as well as a 7 percent decrease in sexual assault offences. On the other side, we saw an increase in assaults and breaking and entering. But that's 2021, and I know the Member -- there's issues going on right now in his community and so people want to know what's going on right now. And there's a number of factors that influence crime rates.
Socioeconomic factors, the age of the population. In the Northwest Territories we have a very young population. We have a significant amount of poverty in the Northwest Territories, a significant amount of trauma in the Northwest Territories. And when you talk about crime rate, that means different things. So there's the crime rate, just a pure number of crimes, and there's the combination of the types of crimes. So the crime severity index is one way that we can look at the crime rate by taking into account how severe certain cases are.
The crime severity index in 2021 also dropped by 6 percent, and the youth crime severity index dropped by 23 percent in 2021. So when we say we're seeing an increase in crime, we are -- there's a general trend. We were following the same trend as Canada up until about I would say maybe five years ago, and then we have continued to increase while the rest of Canada has sort of stayed steady or decreased. But we are very similar to other regions that are similar to us.
So Nunavut and northern Saskatchewan, you can almost map our crime rates, the trajectory, overtop of each other; they almost form a single line so. There's a number of different factors that contribute to the crime rate. And I'll also say that we have twice as many police officers in the Northwest Territories per person compared to the rest of Canada. So just the mere fact that we have that many officers would make you think that we're going to be -- there's going to be more crimes reported. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.