How this data works

Source

Every figure comes from Toronto Police Service’s public open data (Toronto Police Service Public Safety Data Portal), used under the Open Government Licence – Ontario. This site does not add, estimate, or interpret any number Toronto Police hasn’t already published.

What’s included

Full monthly categories with trend history:

• Assault
• Auto Theft
• Break and Enter
• Robbery
• Theft Over
• Bicycle Theft
• Theft from Motor Vehicle

Homicides and shootings are shown separately as a count, never as a percentage change, so that a small number is never turned into a large-looking swing.

When at least half of a category’s reports in a month — and no fewer than 10 — come from a single location, the summary says so, using Toronto Police’s own classification of that location: a detention centre, a hospital, a transit station. Every place is shown on the map at the same offset position regardless.

Sexual violation offences are not included: Toronto Police does not publish row-level historical data for this category, so no reliable monthly count or trend can be produced from it. Figures for this category are available only through Toronto Police’s own dashboards.

A small number of incidents each month are reported to police with no neighbourhood assigned; they count in the city total and in no neighbourhood.

Where this edition shows an average per neighbourhood, it divides the incidents assigned to a neighbourhood by 158.

How a permit’s stage is worked out

The Property Snapshot shows each building permit’s status exactly as the City publishes it, alongside a plain-words stage. The City’s status is never changed or hidden — the stage is an added label, worked out from that status alone.

This edition covers all 158 neighbourhoods, so it summarises the month’s permits by stage rather than listing them by address; each neighbourhood’s edition carries the list.

A stage with fewer than 10 permits in the month is counted inside a single “Other” line rather than shown on its own.

Three kinds of work are named on the city page — new buildings, demolitions, and new laneway or rear-yard suites — chosen because a resident recognises them; the City’s other 61 work codes are not listed there.

1. Applied: The application has been received, and the City is reviewing it or waiting on the applicant.
2. Issued: A permit or revision has been issued, and work has not yet started on site.
3. Work under way: Work is under way, including any inspection or order the City has raised while it proceeds.
4. Closed: The work is complete, the file is dormant, or it has been superseded by a later permit.
5. Cancelled or refused: The application or permit was withdrawn, abandoned, refused, revoked, or is pending cancellation.

The City uses many more status codes than these five stages. The table below shows every code this site knows, and which stage it maps to; a status the table does not yet include is shown on its own, unmapped, next to the permit it belongs to.

How home prices are shown

Figures come from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB)’s monthly Market Watch report, read from the published PDF. TRREB offers no automated feed.

TRREB publishes by district, not by neighbourhood, and a district is usually wider than the area this edition covers. The Property Snapshot’s “How to read this” section names the district behind its figures.

The chart’s dashed line is the trailing twelve months’ total sale dollars divided by total sales: one figure weighted by every sale, not an average of twelve monthly averages.

The home-type list states every sale count TRREB reports. A home type with fewer than 3 sales in the month shows the count but not the average, on the same small-number principle as the safety figures. A type with no sales that month is named rather than shown as zero.

How Committee of Adjustment hearings are shown

Figures come from the City of Toronto’s Committee of Adjustment Applications open data — the same rolling dataset the Committee itself keeps, updated daily.

The number of hearings coming up updates daily as the City’s own data changes; the number decided in the edition’s own month is that edition’s published record and does not change once it has published, the same rule every figure on this site follows.

A row here is one application, not one hearing notice or one property. Only hearings dated after the capture behind this edition count as “coming up” — the City’s own “Active” status covers more than that, including applications whose hearing has already passed or whose file has since closed, so this page never uses “Active” as a stand-in for upcoming.

Where the City’s record says a hearing is tentatively scheduled, postponed or deferred, the list says so beside the address; any other status the City records that is not a firm hearing date is shown in the City’s own words.

Descriptions and decisions are the City’s own words, quoted exactly — never rewritten, summarised, or softened.

The address is published because the record exists for public notice: a Committee of Adjustment hearing is a public meeting a neighbour is meant to be able to find, the same reasoning that applies to the building permits module above. No applicant’s, owner’s, or agent’s name is ever published, whatever the source record holds.

Comparisons

Every edition of The Keelson shows its neighbourhood the same way, and none compares it with another. Where a figure is set against something, it is the city-wide average, stated with the denominator it uses, never a position in a list. This publication does not rank Toronto’s neighbourhoods by reported incidents, and a ranking assembled from these pages is not ours. A count of reported incidents depends on how many people pass through an area, how readily they report, and how large the police boundary is — none of which a rank carries with it.

Dates and revisions

Every report is based on when an incident was reported to police, not when it occurred — this keeps published months stable, since occurrence dates can be revised long after the fact as investigations proceed. Reported does not mean charged, convicted, or verified.

If Toronto Police revises data in a way that materially changes a previously published month, that report is updated with a visible, dated correction note. Published figures are never silently edited. Every correction is listed, with its date and the figure it changed, on the Corrections page.

Privacy

Incident locations are approximate. Toronto Police offset them to the nearest intersection before publishing, and this site shows them no more precisely than that. No addresses, names, or other details about the people involved appear anywhere on this site.

These pages collect no personal information about readers — no names, no addresses, no accounts, and nothing you type. Visits are counted two ways: by a privacy-focused service that stores no cookies and cannot tell one reader from another, and by Google Analytics, which stores a cookie in your browser so that repeat visits can be recognised. A few actions are also counted as anonymous totals — how often the share button is used, how often someone opens a marker on the map, and which category the map is filtered to — so we can tell which parts of the report are useful. Those counts record that something happened, never who did it. Neither service is used to identify you, and neither is shared with the residents’ association or with sponsors.

Signing up for the monthly email is a separate step, handled by EmailOctopus, an outside mailing-list platform — not by this site. Their signup page asks for your email address, the edition you want, and, optionally, a postal code used only to choose which edition you receive. Consent is an unticked box you tick yourself, and nothing is sent until you click a link in a confirmation email sent to that address. Your details are never shared with the residents’ association or a sponsor, never joined with the incident data described above, and deleted promptly if you ask.

The coverage map draws its background imagery from OpenStreetMap, so your browser requests those map tiles from OpenStreetMap’s servers directly.