Crime & Safety

Crime and Safety in Canada

Safety is a basic part of well-being, and crime is usually discussed one incident at a time. This page puts those incidents in context: from the long-run severity of crime down to what is happening in a single neighbourhood. The two authoritative sources are Statistics Canada’s incident-based crime statistics (the UCR) and, for the local view, the Toronto Police Service open-data portal.

One caveat: these are police-reported figures, and most crime is never reported. Statistics Canada’s victimization survey, which asks Canadians directly about their experiences, found that about three in ten (29%) criminal incidents came to the attention of police in 2019. There was also wide variation by offence: roughly half of motor-vehicle thefts and break-and-enters were reported, but only 6% of sexual assaults. Reporting rates also shift over time, so a change in a police-reported series can reflect changes in reporting as well as in crime itself. (Source: Statistics Canada, Criminal victimization in Canada, 2019, Juristat 85-002-X.)

The headline measures: severity and homicide

Two measures summarize the long run picture. The Crime Severity Index weights each offence by its degree of violence (a homicide counts far more than a minor theft) and is indexed to 2006 = 100 (Statistics Canada’s standard base year). The homicide rate is the most consistently measured serious crime over the long run, reaching back to 1961. Use the dropdown to switch between them (and drag the slider to see homicide’s longer history). Everything after this breaks the summary apart: by type of crime, by whether it gets solved, and by place.

What crime do people experience?

The headline index hides composition. A single number can’t tell you whether a place’s issue is car theft, break-ins, assault, or fraud. These are the offences that make up most of the crime people encounter: everyday property and disorder crime, the three tiers of assault (common, with a weapon or injury, and aggravated), and (far rarer) homicide. These can be viewed as rates per 100,000 people so places and years are comparable. Use the geography selector to switch between Canada, any province or territory, and any of the ~40 metropolitan areas (grouped, and searchable by typing a city name).

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The largest category is everyday theft under $5,000. This includes things like package or “porch” theft (no official statistic isolates parcel theft specifically). And theft from a vehicle has fallen sharply over the decade even as vehicle theft itself and fraud have climbed.

What’s rising, and what’s falling?

Overall crime is below its 1990s–2000s levels, but that aggregated picture hides different trajectories within the underlying data. This shows each offence’s change in rate over the last decade. Use the dropdown to switch between Canada, the provinces, and the ten largest cities. Colour indicates direction only.

Fraud and identity theft have roughly doubled; shoplifting is up about two-thirds while traditional property crimes like break-and-enter and theft from vehicles have fallen. Among violent offences, assault involving a weapon or injury has climbed about three times faster than common assault. The question “is crime up or down?” has no single answer.

Hate crime

Police-reported hate crime has risen far faster than crime overall. It roughly tripled since 2014, with sharp jumps in 2020 and again in 2023.

Note: A hate crime is defined as criminal incidents motivated by hatred of a group’s race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or other identity.

Police figures likely undercount hate crime, since these statistics only include those reported to police. The bar below shows the communities targeted per capita to illustrate incidents relative to each community’s size. (Use the toggle to switch to raw incident counts.)

Source: Statistics Canada — hate crime: Table 35-10-0066-01 (selected police services, most of Canada); community populations for the per-capita view: 2021 Census (Tables 98-10-0353 / 0324 / 0264; the sexual-orientation denominator is a StatCan survey estimate, not a census count). Police motivation categories approximate, but don’t exactly match, census groups.
Canada Observatory

Jewish and Black Canadians record the most incidents in raw numbers. Per capita, the picture is starker: relative to population, the Jewish community is targeted far more than any other group, roughly four times the next-highest rate. Incidents targeting Jewish people roughly tripled from 2019, and the 2020–2021 increase fell heaviest on East and Southeast Asian communities.

(The breakdown is from police services covering most, but not all, of Canada, so totals differ slightly from the national series above.)

How often does a crime get solved?

A “cleared” crime is one police have resolved. Most often this is by laying a charge. The clearance rate is the share of reported incidents that get cleared, and it differs enormously by offence: violent crimes, where victims often know the offender, are usually solved; high-volume property crimes mostly are not.

Source: Statistics Canada, Table 35-10-0177-01 | Data as of: 2024
Canada Observatory

Only about 1 in 10 reported vehicle thefts are cleared, and thefts from vehicles even less often, versus more than half of violent crimes. Clearance rises with severity. Aggravated assaults are solved far more often than common ones.

How metro areas compare

Crime across Canada’s ~40 largest metropolitan areas for the latest year (2024). Use the dropdown to change the measure. It opens on the overall Crime Severity Index (the severity-weighted summary, an index), then breaks apart into specific offence rates per 100,000. Each measure rescales to its own range, so a city that ranks high on auto theft may not on break-ins. Zoom and pan to your area. (Larger metros only.)

Auto theft clusters in the Prairie metros and the Toronto–Hamilton region, while violent crime, break-and-enter, and theft-from-vehicle each have different geographies again. A single “crime ranking” of cities hides these very different stories. (Homicide is shown as a rate too, but rests on small annual counts in any one metro.)

Toronto, neighbourhood by neighbourhood

For the everyday, local scale, the Toronto Police Service publishes rates per 100,000 for each of the city’s 158 neighbourhoods. Toronto is shown because its police service publishes the most complete open neighbourhood-level data of any Canadian city. (This project may add other cities in the future as their open-data portals allow.) Switch the offence with the dropdown; hover any neighbourhood for its rate and population. These are the Toronto Police’s own categories and counting rules. This is a different body from Statistics Canada, so this map isn’t directly comparable to the national and metro figures above. Read it as a local map on its own terms. (“Assault (all types)” here, for instance, combines every assault offence (common, with a weapon, aggravated) not just the common-assault tier shown on the StatCan charts.)

Rates per capita look different from raw counts: busy downtown and some inner-suburb neighbourhoods rank high on theft and assault, while violent firearm incidents are rarer and more dispersed. Police locations are approximate (offset to the nearest intersection for privacy), so this is a neighbourhood-level picture, not an address-level one.

Is crime seasonal?

Toronto’s monthly data says most offences are spread fairly evenly across the year. The exception is bike theft, which tracks the cycling season: over 40% of its annual total falls in June–August. Assault is mildly summer-peaked; the rest are close to flat. Each line below shows the share of that crime’s year-round incidents falling in each month.

Bike theft also illustrates the low-clearance pattern: of the nearly 40,000 reported in Toronto since 2014, only about 1% are ever recovered.

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