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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. 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.

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. (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).

Hover:

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, while fraud has climbed. Vehicle theft itself surged to a peak in 2023, then fell back over the next two years.

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.

Canada, offence by offence

The same offences for Canada as a whole, year by year. The violent crime rate peaked at 1,494 per 100,000 in 2000, fell to 1,044 in 2014, and was 1,443 in 2025. Use the dropdown to switch offences.

Toronto, offence by offence

A change over one decade compresses a path into a single number. For the Toronto area, the path matters: the motor vehicle theft rate fell from 412 per 100,000 in 1998 to 110 in 2013, climbed to 421 in 2023, and was 238 in 2025. Violent crime fell from 1,118 to a low of 720 in 2014 and was 987 in 2025. Use the dropdown to switch offences; the dashed line is Canada’s rate. “Toronto” here is the census metropolitan area, which takes in Peel, York, and Durham.

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.

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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.)

Data 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.
Chart: canadaobservatory.ca

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 between 2019 and 2023, 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.)

By city

The same police-reported figures, for Canada’s largest metropolitan areas. In 2025 the rate ranged from 23.8 incidents per 100,000 people in Victoria to 6.6 in Edmonton; Toronto recorded 1,026 incidents, a rate of 16.2. Use the toggle for the raw counts. Rates in a single metro rest on small annual counts and on how actively each police service identifies and records hate motivation, so differences between cities are only partly differences in what happens there.

Toronto’s own series, year by year, against the national rate. The city’s rate has run above Canada’s in every year of the series.

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.

Data source: Statistics Canada, Table 35-10-0177-01 | Data as of: 2025
Chart: canadaobservatory.ca

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 (2025). 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.)

Safety beyond the crime count

Much of what people describe as disorder in public places, such as someone in acute distress on a platform, open drug use, or a crowd that turns threatening, never becomes a recorded crime. No statistic measures disorder as it is experienced. What exists are a few official series that measure things next to it, and each needs its own definition stated.

Mental Health Act apprehensions

The Toronto Police Service publishes the number of apprehensions under Ontario’s Mental Health Act: an officer took a person to hospital for assessment on grounds that the person was acting in a disorderly way and was a danger to themselves or others. The chart groups the police’s premises types into homes, outside or in transit, and other premises. (The police also publish the calls they attend for people in crisis, but since 2022 the Toronto Community Crisis Service has taken over calls that police used to attend, so that series no longer measures one thing over time and is not shown.)

Apprehensions rose from 7,387 in 2014 to a peak of 13,350 in 2021 and were 12,705 in 2025. Those made outside or in transit went from 1,268 to 2,512, about 20% of the latest year’s total. An apprehension is a police action, so the count reflects police practice and hospital capacity as well as the number of people in crisis; only police can apprehend, which is why this series is comparable across the years when the crisis service took on other calls.

What is measured only in part

Transit. The TTC reports offences against customers per million boardings in its monthly CEO’s report, as a figure and a twelve-month average rather than a published series. Its February 2026 report put the rate at 1.95 for November 2025, with a twelve-month average of 2.62, down about 11% from a year earlier, and 62% of surveyed customers satisfied with their personal safety. Those are the TTC’s numbers for that month; the site does not yet carry the series.

How safe people feel. Statistics Canada asks whether people feel safe walking alone in their neighbourhood after dark. In 2019, the most recent General Social Survey cycle published, 80% of Canadians said they felt very or reasonably safe. No current figure by metropolitan area is published, so the site cannot show how that feeling differs between cities or how it has changed since.

What no series counts. Whether a protest was disruptive, whether behaviour on a street was threatening, or whether drug use was in the open are judgments that no dataset records. The series above are the closest official measures, and they should be read for what they count.

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

Reported bicycle thefts in Toronto peaked at 3,992 in 2018 and numbered 2,131 in 2025. The most recent year can still rise as late reports are added. Bike theft also illustrates the low-clearance pattern: of the nearly 40,000 reported since 2014, only about 1% are ever recovered.

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