How the Safety Score works
Every Toronto neighbourhood, street, and searched address on Safety Score gets a Safety Score from 1 to 100. Higher means less reported crime. A score of 70 means crime typical of a Toronto neighbourhood, so you can read any score as "better or worse than the typical area of the city."
What goes into the score
Scores are built entirely from official Toronto Police Service open data - the same reported-crime datasets that power the rest of this site. Each crime category is weighted by severity, so a homicide affects the score far more than a stolen bike:
- Homicide (weight 25), Assault (20)
- Shooting (15), Robbery (15)
- Break and enter (10), Auto theft (8)
- Theft over $5,000 (4), Theft from vehicle (3), Bike theft (3)
Neighbourhood scores
For each of Toronto's 158 neighbourhoods we take the annual reported-crime rates per 100,000 residents (published for 2014 onward), normalize each category, apply the severity weights, and combine them into one index anchored so that 1.0 equals the median Toronto neighbourhood-year - the "typical" area of the city.
The index becomes a score on a logarithmic scale: score = 70 - 25 x log2(index), kept within 1-99. Double the typical crime level costs 25 points; half of it earns 25 points. Because every year is scored against the same fixed baseline, the year-by-year charts show real long-term trends.
Street and property scores
When you search an address, the street score looks at reported incidents within your chosen radius over the last 12 months, severity-weighted, and compares that to what the same circle would contain if crime were spread evenly across Toronto. The property score blends the street reading (60%) with the surrounding neighbourhood's score (40%), so a single quiet or noisy block does not swing the headline number.
What the score is not
- It measures reported crime only. Unreported incidents are not captured, and reporting rates can vary by area and crime type.
- Busy destinations (downtown, entertainment areas, major malls) naturally see more incidents per square kilometre because far more people pass through. The score reflects reported incident density, not your personal risk.
- Incident locations are approximate - police offset them to the nearest intersection to protect privacy.
- It is not a rating of people or communities, and it should never be the only input to a housing or business decision.
Updates
Street and property scores refresh automatically every few hours as new reports are published. Neighbourhood scores update when Toronto Police publish new annual rate data. Email subscribers can opt in to be notified when the score for their saved area changes.
Check your score
Search your address on the Toronto crime map to see your property, street, and neighbourhood Safety Scores.