Map of the Week: Drug charges

CANADIAN PRESS

Map: Average annual drug charges per 1,000 residents, 2004-2008

This week continues our occasional series of neighbourhood crime maps with a look at drug charges.

The most obvious thing about the map is the higher rates of drug charges more or less downtown, roughly in an area bounded by Queen/King, Bathurst, Bloor and Parliament, more or less. The missing piece of information is how many of these charges were laid against residents of any given neighbourhood, and how many against people from outside.

Looking more broadly at the city, we see the familiar check-mark shape extending diagonally down though the west end, through the downtown and up again through Scarborough. This appears on many other maps, including this one and this one.

The rate is averaged over five years because of significant year-to year fluctuation in many areas.

The map shows five years of data for all 140 neighbourhoods, as seen below:

Map(s): Vehicle theft and homicide rates

Map: Five-year homicide rates by neighbourhood

Map: Vehicle theft rates, 2008

This week, we continue our crime series 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.

Vehicle theft is strongly concentrated in the northwest of the city, a pattern we saw more crudely in a division-based map last year. A four-neighbourhood clump centres more or less on the De Havilland plant. West Humber-Clairville, in the city’s northwest corner, has the highest rate, one of only two neighbourhoods with a rate above 10 2008 vehicle thefts per 1,000. (Yorkdale-Glen Park is the other. )

Here are the top 10:

1 West Humber-Clairville
2 Yorkdale-Glen Park
3 Humber Summit
4 York University Heights
5 Newtonbrook West
6 Clanton Park
7 L'Amoreaux
8 Downsview-Roding-CFB
9 Clairlea-Birchmount
10 Islington-City Centre West

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I took all five years worth of data to get something recognizable as a neighbourhood-scale homicide rate.

High homicide rates (by Toronto standards) concentrate in four areas: Downsview/Rexdale/Jane-Finch; Parkdale and Niagara; the east downtown; and northwestern Scarborough.

Here are the top 10:

1 Elms-Old Rexdale
2 Black Creek
3 Moss Park
4 Danforth Village - Toronto
5 Morningside
6 Rustic
7 Glenfield-Jane Heights
8 Regent Park
9 Church-Yonge Corridor
10 Cabbagetown-South St. James Town

Individual homicides (omitting 2004 and including 2009 to date) can be seen here.

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

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:

Maps elsewhere: Ontario incarceration rates

Reporter Jim Rankin has the first part of a series on neighbourhood incarceration rates in today's paper. You may remember a similar series in 2007 - the major update this year is data including the full six-digit postal codes of jail inmates, which allows for very detailed mapping.

Rankin was at first denied this information, but eventually the Information and Privacy Commissioner office ruled in his favour on appeal (the decision can be read here)

In any case, two maps go with today's story:

a Flash-based interactive map of incarceration rates by postal code covering the whole province and

an incarceration map of Toronto based on six-digit postal codes.

It bears more than a passing resemblance to our map of male homicide victims from a few weeks ago.

Map of the Week: Gender and homicide

AARON LYNETT/TORONTO STAR

Map: Homicides with male victims, January 2005-June 2009

Map: Homicides with female victims, January 2005-June 2009

We have been mapping homicides in the GTA's five regions since January, 2005, and sorting them by a number of characteristics. (Our main homicide map, with victims sorted by age, gender, year and gun/non-gun is here.)

One distinct pattern on the map is gender - homicides with male victims are much more clearly tied to geography than homicides with female victims. This week's maps separate male from female homicide victims to show the pattern more clearly.

Homicides with male victims form a sharply defined pattern, starting in Malton and continuing east through Rexdale, then down along Jane and Weston Road into the downtown. To the east, they spread out into Scarborough in a looser way, with clusters in Flemingdon Park, north of Danforth and Victoria Park, and Malvern.

Killings of women are more diffuse on the map, with the closest thing to a real pattern along Dundas, and Yonge between Dundas and Bloor.

This is a one-off map (with data current to June 13, 2009), and will not be updated. If you are looking for an updated homicide map for the GTA after that date, go here.

Map of the Week: Pedestrian accidents

CHARLA JONES/TORONTO STAR

(July 11: The pedestrian and cycling accident maps worked fine on their own as embedded maps, but something about displaying them both on the same page made many browsers very unstable. They’re now linked below.)

Map: Pedestrian accidents, 2008

This week, we look at 2008’s pedestrian accidents. A total of 1,932 were reported to police last year.
Outside the downtown core, pedestrian accidents are concentrated on Eglinton between Brimley and Markham Rd., Sheppard between Kennedy Rd. and Warden, Yonge between Steeles and the 401, and Mount Pleasant south of Eglinton.

Here are the top eight intersections for pedestrian collisions:

9    BATHURST and KING
6    BLOOR and LANSDOWNE
5    CHURCH and JANE
5    COLLEGE and SPADINA
5    JANE and WILSON
5    KEELE and LAWRENCE
5    LAWRENCE and MARKHAM
5    STEELES and YONGE

For local areas, the map works best at the highest or second-highest magnification.

Nerd box:

The larger numbers involved forced a different presentation from last week’s bike collision map. This map only shows locations where two or more pedestrian accidents happened during the year, with circles of different sizes indicating the number.

I tried mapping all the accidents, but the map looked like this:

If you don't mind the visual clutter, a map showing single accidents is here.

It works best at the highest magnification and needs some patience, but does add new information. For example: Mount Pleasant between Roehampton (a block north of Eglinton) and Balliol (a block north of the cemetery) had 11 pedestrian accidents last year, or about one per 100 metres of roadway. Roncesvalles between High Park Boulevard and Queen also had more than I would have expected - eight, or one for every 112 metres of roadway.

What patterns do you see? Let us know in the comments.

Map of the Week: Bike accidents

(July 11: The pedestrian and cycling accident maps worked fine on their own as embedded maps, but something about displaying them both on the same page made many browsers very unstable. They’re now linked below.)

Map: Bicycle accidents, 2008

This week, we map 1,068 bicycle accidents reported to Toronto police in 2008. The data came to us from the Toronto transportation department, which analyzes accident reports they receive from the police.

Bike accidents seem to cluster in the area west of downtown, especially on College between Spadina and maybe Dufferin, and Queen between Spadina and Ossington. Dundas, King and Bloor have fewer, though Bloor between Avenue and Bathurst has more. To the east, the Bloor cluster ends abruptly at Jarvis.

(The equivalent part of the east end, which is similar in urban design, has far fewer bike accidents, though accidents do cluster on the Danforth between Pape and Broadview.)

Bay between College and Bloor also seems to have a cluster, as do major streets in the downtown area south of Dundas and north of Adelaide or so.

Time didn’t allow an overlay showing bike lanes. (Maps can be found here and here) Informally, though, accidents seem to cluster where bike lanes aren’t, and vice versa. Exceptions seem to be the College bike lane and a stretch of the Dundas St. E. bike lane west of Pape, where there is nearly one accident per block.

110 intersections had more than one accident (the great majority with two). Here are the top nine:

7     Bay and Dundas
7     College and Crawford
5     Queen and Broadview
5     Yonge and Dundas
4     Bloor and Bathurst
4     Bloor and Keele
4     Spadina and Dundas
4     Islington and the Queensway
4     King and John

Nerd box:

The large number of points created a challenge. Our normal method of loading them into an XML file created a map which was slow to load and reload at a different zoom level, and also slow to manipulate, even in Firefox. In IE it was worse.

Our alternative, loading a KML file into Google MyMaps, failed when it refused to keep loading somewhere in the mid-hundreds. MyMaps has limits, but it’s sometimes hard to see what they are other than by trial and error.

We ended up with Geocommons, the free service that the Vancouver Sun used for its parking ticket map.

In IE, it takes anywhere from 9 to 17 seconds to load, but as far as I can tell stays loaded once that has happened. The main difference, as far as I can tell, is that it uses Flash.

In any case, the look and feel of the map is different from what you may be used to seeing – let us know what you think in the comments.

The full-sized map can be seen here.

Next week, we will look at pedestrian accidents.

Map of the Week: Grow operations

TARA WALTON/TORONTO STAR

Map: 2008 marijuana grow operations

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Marijuana grow op busts in Toronto were down in 2008, at 145 compared to 256 in 2007 and 254 in 2006.

However, the pattern is similar (see the 2007 map or 2006 map for comparison), with grow operations concentrated in parts of the city where low income meets low density.

We see the northern tips of the V or check-mark shape visible on other maps (for example the homicide map or map of low household incomes)

As before, grow ops are most strongly concentrated in northern Scarborough and the Hwy. 400 corridor north of Hwy. 401, which gives 31 Division and 42 Division the city's highest rates.

Map of the Week: Military recruiting

REUTERS

Map: Regular force enrolments

Map: Reserve force enrolments

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This week, we look at military recruiting in the GTA, using 2007 enlistment data.

Reporter Allan Woods looked at recruiting a few days ago:

The military has tempered force projections and launched massive recruiting drives but it still can't increase its numbers enough to meet repeated government pledges, a new report finds.

While the rest of the country trembles in fear of layoffs and unemployment numbers soar, the demand for soldiers, technicians and other specialists in the Canadian Forces outpaced actual growth for yet another year, the Department of National Defence said in an annual report to Parliament.

The first thing to say is that recruiting rates in central Ontario are very low by the standards of some other parts of the country. A0A in eastern Newfoundland, for example, had 55 residents join the regular force in 2007, for a rate per 1,000 of 1.15. B1H, in New Waterford, N.S., had a rate of 1.7 per 1,000, and B1P, in Sydney, had a rate of 0.93 per 1,000.

The GTA's highest rate, on the other hand, was in M3K (0.54 per 1,000), which is perhaps a special case, since it contains the former Downsview military base. (Most were reservists transferring to the regular force).

Other than Downsview, the area's highest rate was in Aldershot (L7T) with eight regular force recruits (0.49 per 1,000).

I will admit that the regular force enrolment map did not look at all like what I expected.

Leaving Durham aside for a moment, regular force enrolments in the GTA are concentrated in high-income neighbourhoods more than anywhere else.

In the 416, after Downsview, the highest postal codes are:

M5N, northwest of Avenue Rd. and Eglinton

M8W, in southwest Etobicoke

M4P, north of Eglinton and Mount Pleasant

M4S, south of Eglinton and Mount Pleasant

M8X, the Kingsway

M6P, High Park and the Junction

In the 905, excluding Durham, the highest postal codes are:

L7T, Aldershot

L7J, Acton

L7N, south-central Burlington

L6K, south Oakville

L3Y, Newmarket

By regional standards, regular force recruiting is stronger in Durham, with rates over 0.2 in Whitby, Oshawa and rural areas to the north.

Toronto recruits seem strongly concentrated in the combat arms. M5N's six recruits, for example, were three combat engineers, an infantryman, a supply technician and a logistics officer. A0A's recruits, on the other hand, included 11 truck drivers, four cooks, eight vehicle technicians, six combat engineers and two infantrymen.

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TORONTO STAR FILE

It's harder to see a pattern in the reserve enlistment map, and it may be that the numbers are too small.

Leaving aside low-population L0H and L1Y with their one recruit each, reserve recruiting is highest in:

M5S, University of Toronto downtown campus

L9N, Holland Landing

L0B, Scugog

L7T, Aldershot

L3Y, Newmarket

L7S, central Burlington

M3C, Flemingdon Park

L7L, Burlington along Appleby Line

L4B, Richmond Hill

M4E, the Beaches

L1T, north Ajax

L5H, lakeshore Mississauga west of Mississauga Rd.

Street racing (part two): Ontario's top 20 and the GTA's hot zone

PAWEL DWULIT/TORONTO STAR

This week's map, showing Ontario's top 20 postal areas for street racing suspension rates, looks very different from the drunk driving map from a few weeks ago.

The drunk driving map was rural, small-town and northern, while the street racing map is strongly centred in the GTA. Only three communities on the street racing top 20 list are outside the GTA and Dufferin County: Petawawa, Aylmer, and Hanmer, north of Sudbury. (The only community to appear on both maps is Petawawa.)

There is a very strong pattern of high street racing rates in an area stretching northwest from Vaughan, covering all of Caledon and Orangeville and stretching into Dufferin County. Only part of this pattern was visible last week.

The street racing age graph is different from the drunk driving graph, with its two peaks in early adulthood and middle age - it simply peaks at 21 and declines.

17% of the drivers suspended for street racing were female, about the same proportion that we saw with impaired driving. Unlike drunk driving, the age graph for female street racers looks more or less identical to the age graph for male ones.

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I omitted FSAs with fewer than five suspensions during the period. For the record, here are the areas dropped from the top 20 list:

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Map of the Week: Street racing (part one)

AARON LYNETT/TORONTO STAR

Licence suspensions for street racing, September 30, 2007 to September 12, 2008, per 1,000 by postal area.

In the Greater Toronto Area, street racing (map) seems to be centred in the area of Peel between Orangeville and Brampton, spilling over into nearby areas of York Region around Kleinburg and Woodbridge.

The one standout exception to the general pattern is M5J, the postal area that takes in the waterfront condos downtown. This is, I hope coincidentally, the neighbourhood across Yonge St. from the Toronto Star. M5J has the third-highest rate in the GTA, and (not to give away next week's map) the fifth-highest rate in the province.

Other than M5J, there is no clear concentration in the 416 area code, other than M2L, in the Bayview and York Mills area.

One interesting thing is that this map doesn't have very much in common with the GTA impaired driving map. Accused street racers seem concentrated in one area, mostly, while impaired drivers are spread all over the GTA with higher numbers in more car-dependent areas.

Low-population L0L, along the 404 in Whitchurch-Stouffville, had only three suspensions during the period but is included on the map out of consistency.

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Information was obtained from the Ministry of Transportation under access-to-information legislation.

Map of the Week: Driver testing

COLIN MCCONNELL/TORONTO STAR

A story by reporter Daniel Dale in Sunday's paper looked at the wildly varying failure rates at driver test centres:

Ontario drivers who take their road tests in Brampton fail at nearly five times the rate of drivers in Sault Ste. Marie.

Drivers who test in Oakville fail at twice the rate of drivers in Kingston. Drivers who test in north Toronto fail at twice the rate of drivers in Sarnia. Even within the GTA, drivers who test at some locations fail significantly more often than drivers at others.

The rumours that have circulated for years among the province's driver's ed students are correct: there is indeed such a thing as a relatively easy or relatively difficult place to take a road test, government figures obtained via a freedom of information request confirm.

Dale's data (link (.pdf)) lends itself well to online mapping. Here is a map of Ontario's 55 driver testing centres, ranked in order by failure rate.

Map of the Week: Impaired driving in the GTA

TORONTO POLICE HANDOUT

In this week’s first map, we look at impaired driving in the whole GTA, including some rural areas we haven't included before. (Last week's map, which looked at impaired driving across Ontario, is here.)

The region's highest rates of impaired driving are in rural areas of Halton, York and Durham, beginning with Scugog Township, rural Milton, Georgina and Uxbridge. The only exception to the pattern is downtown Oshawa, in the #2 spot. After that, we have Bowmanville and south Pickering, followed by King, an area of Brampton along the 401, and western Oshawa.

In Toronto itself (separate map), impaired driving is concentrated in northern Etobicoke and eastern Scarborough. The highest incidence is in Downsview.

The most obvious relationship here is with car dependency, with the highest impaired driving rates being in the areas with least access to high-quality public transit.

Only one of Toronto's 68 subway stations is in an FSA which had over 1.0 suspensions per thousand, and that one (Kipling) is on the extreme southeast corner of M9B. In fairness, we could also include M8Y, which is across the street from Old Mill and Royal York stations, but that ends the exceptions.

Toronto's impaired driving rates are low by regional standards (and even lower by provincial standards).

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Note: We've been steadily expanding the postal areas depicted on our maps - there are now nearly 200. If the maps take a long time to load, you may find they display better in Firefox.

Map of the Week: Impaired driving, part 1 (updated)

CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR

This week starts our two-part series on impaired driving.

The map shows the top 20 of Ontario's 523 postal areas for driver's licence suspension for impaired driving in 2007. I excluded two low-population areas.*

There are several distinct clusters:

Northwestern Ontario stands out, with Sioux Lookout (#1 on the list), Kenora and Fort Frances all in the top 20.

Communities in the Muskoka-Parry Sound area have four places in the top 10.

Two postal areas in and around Brockville are in the top 20.

Both of Cornwall's two postal codes are on the list.

Preston and a nearby Cambridge postal code are #20 and #19, respectively.

The information was obtained from the Ministry of Transportation under freedom-of-information legislation. It is taken from the database that supports this program (scroll down to Immediate Licence Suspension).

Using the FOI process sometimes seems to imply some tension between a journalist and a branch of government. That is certainly sometimes the case. However, in this instance, the MOT very helpfully threw in the age and sex of the suspended drivers, data I hadn’t thought to ask for.

Here is what we learn from this extra information:

The male-female ratio is about 7:1 (14,551 to 2,365).

The age graph is surprising. There are very few teenagers. The graph rises steeply at 20, peaks at 23, declines gently after that point, then starts to rise again at 40, hitting a second peak at 45. After that point, it shows a clear second decline.

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Click on the chart to see the full image.

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Update: It occured to me to create the age graph for female drunk drivers (who, it bears repeating, are a small minority at just under 14% of the total). The age graph for male drunk drivers is perhaps not surprisingly similar to the one above. The graph for women, on the other hand, has some differences:

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Click on the chart to see the full image.

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Women drunk drivers turn out to be more middle-aged than their male counterparts. While the highest age group for male drunk drivers is 23, the highest age group for female drunk drivers is 43.

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In part 2, which may or may not run next week, we will look at the impaired driving map of the GTA.

Map may display better in Firefox.

* L0H (Gormley), with five suspensions and a population of 713, and K1P (central Ottawa) with two suspensions and a population of 396.

Thanks again to Star computer-assisted reporting editor Andy Bailey for his help with the data.

Map of the Week: Crime

MICHAEL STUPARYK/TORONTO STAR

This week’s maps depict Toronto crime rates by police division, drawn from from this page.

The six maps cover sexual assault, assault, robbery, breaking and entering, auto theft and theft over $5,000.

The available crime data covers the period from January 1 through August 28 of this year, so the crime rates per 1,000 should not be read as annual crime rates. Its usefulness is showing how crime, or at least reported crime, varies between neighbourhoods.

Downtown’s 52 Division (which has a resident population of about 41,000, far lower than the average of about 161,000) is included on the map out of consistency, but this is one case where looking at a ratio of residents and reported crime breaks down. There's disproportionately people and activity compared to the resident population.

There are certain patterns. Breaking and entering is concentrated in 55, 51, 52 and 14 Divisions, in the central city. The city's northwest (23 and 31 Divisions), on the other hand, seems to suffer more car theft.

The Toronto police publish this disclaimer about the data.