Map of the Week: Breaking and entering

SHUTTERSTOCK

Map: Breaking and entering rates

Map: Change in breaking and entering, 2004-8

This week, we begin an occasional series on crime, using neighbourhood-based crime statistics produced by the Toronto police. These use the City of Toronto neighbourhood boundaries, not the set produced by our neighbourhood project earlier in the year.

Before I saw the map, I expected more burglary in high-income neighbourhoods, based on the idea that wealthy people would be more likely to have things worth stealing. That turns out not to be consistently true, though the Bridle Path and Casa Loma do have high rates. The stronger relationship seems to be with areas around universities, with U of T, York and (almost) Ryerson in areas with very high burglary rates.

Here are the top 20:

1 University
2 Bay Street Corridor
3 Kensington-Chinatown
4 Moss Park
5 Bridle Path-Sunnybrook-York Mills
6 East End-Danforth
7 Casa Loma
8 York University Heights
9 Annex
10 Church-Yonge Corridor
11 Waterfront Communities-The Island
12 Rosedale-Moore Park
13 Woodbine Corridor
14 Clairlea-Birchmount
15 West Humber-Clairville
16 South Riverdale
17 Little Portugal
18 Roncesvalles
19 The Beaches
20 Forest Hill South

It’s an odd mixture of areas, and I’d be curious to know what readers make of it.

One striking pattern is the fall in breaking and entering between 2004 and 2008 in most areas.

This trend has been noticed elsewhere in Canada, in the United States and in England. Burglary rates in the United States are somewhat more than half what they were in 1988.

Two business/economics blogs (link, link) have floated the idea that the decline in burglaries is linked to falling prices of manufactured goods – in other words, that burglars are a casualty of free trade.

The maps show five years of burglary data for all 140 neighbourhoods, as seen below:

Map of the Week

will appear next week.

Maps elsewhere: Religious affiliation

RENÉ JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR

StatsCan only asks about religious affiliation on the ten-year, or decennial censuses, so these maps on the City of Toronto's site (.pdf files) are based on 2001 data.

However, the patterns they show shed light on how religion intersects with Toronto neighbourhoods.

Roman Catholics show a strong pattern roughly along Dufferin, then more northwest north of the 401.

Anglicans cluster along Yonge Street and shoreline Scarborough, while Presbyterians and United Church affiliations have roughly similar maps, clustering in mid-Etobicoke, the Yonge St. corridor, and shoreline Scarborough.

The city’s Jewish population clusters strongly along Bathurst north of St. Clair. Muslims concentrate roughly along Taylor’s Creek and the area to the north from Thorncliffe Park east into Scarborough.

People with no religious affiliation cluster in the downtown lake shore generally, and also south of Steeles from eastern North York into Scarborough.

It is a pity we have to wait until after the 2011 census to see how, or if, these patterns change.

Click here to see all the maps.

Map of the Week: Obesity

TORONTO STAR FILE

This week's map also uses data from the Canadian Community Health Survey, this time looking at obesity in Ontario by health region.

In many ways, it resembles last week's smoking map: northern and rural communities at the top, medium-sized cities in the middle, and urban areas at the bottom.

The top five are:
1) Northwestern
2) Porcupine
3) Hastings and Prince Edward
4) Huron
5) Timiskaming

The bottom five are:
32) Halton
33) York Region
34) City of Ottawa
35) Peel Region
36) City of Toronto

The map uses 2005 data.

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View obesity in a larger map

Percentage	Colour
20 and above
17.5-20
15-17.5
Under 15

Key added Aug 17

Map of the Week: Smoking

REUTERS

I've been wanting to do a smoking-related map for a while, but couldn't see where the data would come from. Then a reader pointed me to the Community Health Survey's smoking study, which breaks down Ontario by public health regions, which more or less correspond to the borders of major municipalities (city/region/county/district, depending on where in the province you are).

The map shows the percentage of residents over 12 who reported being daily smokers in the most recent year available, which was 2005.

The very strong pattern the map shows is high smoking rates in rural and northern areas, lower rates in small cities, and very low rates in large cities: Windsor, London, K-W, the Greater Toronto Area and Ottawa.

Haldimand-Norfolk and Elgin, both on the top five list, are home to Ontario's remaining tobacco farms.

The top five are:
1) Haldimand-Norfolk
2) Porcupine
3) Hastings and Prince Edward
4) Leeds, Grenville and Lanark
5) Elgin

The bottom five are:
32) Middlesex-London
33) City of Ottawa
34) City of Toronto
35) York Region
36) Perth

View smoking in a larger map

Knight-Batten Awards

This blog was listed as a notable entry recently for the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, further explained here. Other entries in that category included demotix.com, which played an important role during the aftermath of the Iranian election in getting freelance images to the West, and the Associated Press’s Flash-based Economic Stress Index map, which measures economic strain by U.S. county.

The full list can be found here.

The grand prize was won by six major online projects produced by the New York Times, including this very compelling one (note the tabs):