What Is a Good Safety Score in Toronto? Understanding the 1-100 Scale
Every neighbourhood, street, and address on Safety Score gets a Safety Score from 1 to 100. It is designed so you can read any score at a glance, but a scale is only useful if you know where "normal" sits. Here is how to interpret it.
70 means typical for Toronto
The scale is anchored to the median Toronto neighbourhood, not to some ideal of zero crime. A score of 70 means reported crime at that location looks like the typical Toronto community. From there:
- 85 and up - very low crime; roughly half the typical crime mix or less
- 70 to 84 - low crime; quieter than the typical neighbourhood
- 55 to 69 - typical for Toronto
- 40 to 54 - above-average reported crime
- Below 40 - high reported crime relative to the rest of the city
The scale is logarithmic: every 25 points represents a doubling or halving of severity-weighted crime. That keeps the difference between 80 and 90 as meaningful as the difference between 40 and 50.
Not all crime counts equally
A raw incident count treats a stolen bicycle the same as a homicide, which is obviously wrong for judging safety. The score weights each category by severity: homicide and assault weigh the most, followed by shootings and robbery, then break-and-enter and auto theft, with property theft weighing the least. Two areas with identical report counts can have very different scores if one's reports are mostly bike thefts and the other's are mostly violent crime. The exact weights are published on the methodology page.
Why downtown scores look low
The score measures reported incident density - how much reported crime happens in a given area. Places where hundreds of thousands of people pass through daily (the entertainment district, major malls, transit hubs) generate far more reports per square kilometre than a residential side street, even if your personal risk while walking through is modest. A low score downtown mostly reflects that intensity of activity. That is not a flaw to hide; it is just what the number measures, and it is worth knowing when you compare a condo at Yonge and Dundas to a house in a quiet subdivision.
Scores change - and you can watch them
Neighbourhood scores update when Toronto Police publish new annual crime rates, and street-level scores refresh every few hours as new reports come in. Every neighbourhood page shows the score's full history back to 2014, so you can tell a steadily improving area from one that is slipping. If you want to be notified when an area you care about moves, search the address on the crime map and turn on score-change alerts.
The fine print
The score is built entirely from reported crime in Toronto Police open data. It cannot see unreported incidents, and reporting rates vary between communities and crime types. It is not a judgment of the people who live anywhere, and it should never be the only factor in a housing decision. Use it the way you would use a walk score: a fast, honest summary of the data, not a verdict.