The statistics used to create the crime map were provided to CBC News by the office of Toronto Coun. Denzil Minnan-Wong. His office had obtained the data, which was collected by Toronto police, from the city.

The names and boundaries of the 140 neighbourhoods depicted in the map are based on the City of Toronto's official neighbourhoods. Clicking on one of the neighbourhoods will reveal the statistics going back to 2004 for each crime category.

The colour gradient on the map is based on the range of criminal occurrences per 10,000 neighbourhood residents in each category in 2011.

For instance, there were 369 instances of assault reported in the Kensington-Chinatown neighbourhood in 2011. But the figure that was plotted on the map for that neighbourhood is 199.3, which is the number of assaults reported per 10,000 residents of Kensington-Chinatown in 2011, as reported in the census.

Per capita numbers are not displayed for past years because there is no reliable population estimate for those neighbourhoods for any of those years except 2006, which was another census year.

The "ranking" of a neighbourhood as it relates to criminal occurrences was also based on this per capita figure, and not the actual number of criminal occurrences in that area.

Limitations

• There is a significant portion of criminal occurrences that have no associated geographical information. Those incidents have been laid out in a table below, as have the crime numbers for the city as a whole. Note that the city numbers include the occurrences that have no associated geographical information.
• When it comes to drug charges in particular, there is a high proportion of ungeocoded occurrences. Drug charges with no associated geographic information accounted for 35.5 per cent of all drug charges in Toronto for 2011. "This could happen because the event occurred at a new address that has yet to be uploaded onto data tables or it was inputted as a general address, such as 'Eaton Centre' or ‘Near Yonge and Dundas,’" a police spokeswoman said in an email.
• The murder section of the crime map should be interpreted cautiously, considering there were only 45 homicides in the city in 2011. With this relatively small sample size, it is not advisable, for instance, to conclude on the basis of murder data, that a given neighbourhood is significantly more prone to murders than another. Moreover, there were no murders at all in 100 of the 140 neighbourhoods.
• Some crime indicators, notably, assault, encompass a wide range of criminal behaviour. There is no way of being able to judge the severity of assaults from the data that was made available to us. For example, there is no way of telling if a given neighbourhood has a high proportion of extremely violent assaults relative to the total number of assaults.

Crime indicators for Toronto

	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
Assault	24449	25420	25178	24743	23677	23046	22861	22759
Break and enter	17357	15172	15618	14354	12987	12405	11921	10961
Drug charges	6340	5992	7244	7029	7165	6635	7002	7965
Murder	64	80	71	86	70	62	63	50
Robbery	5349	5652	5916	5710	5478	5448	5218	5341
Sexual assault	2629	2901	2708	2537	2566	2689	2851	2991
Stolen vehicle	11102	10457	10307	9806	7869	6542	5544	4385
Theft over $5,000	1633	1352	1188	1124	1040	1038	1008	989
Total	68923	67026	68230	65389	60852	57865	56468	55441

Crime indicators with no associated geographic information

	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
Assault	1929	2146	2019	1827	1179	1673	1701	1672
Break and enter	629	498	501	481	381	463	394	426
Drug charges	1561	1367	1806	1707	1617	1788	2772	2830
Murder	4	5	0	3	6	1	1	1
Robbery	689	810	690	636	523	576	530	519
Sexual assault	395	558	535	495	425	450	595	524
Stolen vehicle	1245	1174	1051	718	479	385	355	220
Theft over $5,000	167	160	136	91	77	61	67	82
Total	6619	6718	6738	5958	5287	5397	6415	6274