Crime and policing costs in Ontario—the key takeaways

Crime and public safety are perennial preoccupations given recent increases in crime rates accompanied by concerns about the cost of policing. After several decades when police-reported crime rates (available from Statistics Canada) have come down in Canada and Ontario, the period since 2014 has seen an increase in both violent and property crime rates in major Canadian cities though rates remain relatively low by recent historic standards. However, homicides are an exception as the rate per 100,000 is actually higher now than it was in the late-1990s.

An overview of Ontario and Canadian crime rates begins with the first chart below showing homicide rates over the 1998 to 2023 period. From 1998 to 2014, the homicide rate per 100,000 declined by 16 per cent in Ontario and 21 per cent in Canada. Ontario’s homicide rate is generally lower than Canada as a whole but both Canada and Ontario have seen a rise in homicides since 2014—Canada’s homicide rate has risen from 1.5 to 1.9 per 100,000 (an increase of 27 per cent) while Ontario has gone from 1.2 to 1.7 per 100,000 (an increase of 42 per cent).

The second chart below illustrates a similar pattern of declining overall crime rates to approximately 2014 and increases thereafter. For both property crime and violent crimes, Canadian rates are again higher than Ontario. There’s also a noticeable dip in property crime rates in 2020 during the pandemic for both Canada and Ontario. However, the violent crime rate for Canada as a whole declined only slightly during the pandemic with a more noticeable drop for Ontario. The reasons for the declines in some crime rates and not others during the pandemic will no doubt be grist for criminologist mills for years to come.

National and provincial level patterns and trends may mask the fact that there are substantial variations in crime rates not only across provinces but within provinces. The third chart illustrates plots total criminal code violations per 100,000 population (including traffic violations) in 2022 for major municipalities in Ontario and ranks them highest to lowest. The highest rates were in Kingston, Brantford, London, Thunder Bay and Chatham-Kent while the lowest rates were in the GTA region cities of Brampton, Clarington, Oakville, Burlington and Milton. The range of these differences is quite large. For example, in 2022 highest ranked Kingston had 6,513 total criminal code violations per 100,000 compared to 2,521 for lowest ranked Milton—a 158 per cent difference.

Of course, what comes to mind given large differences in crime rates across Ontario cities is the impact on municipal policing costs. To compare policing costs in 2022 for major Ontario municipalities, data are available in BMA Management Consulting’s 2023 and 2022 Municipal Studies. The fourth chart plots net policing costs per capita (excluding amortization) for these municipalities. In 2022, per-capita spending ranges from a high of $563 in Thunder Bay to a low of $288 in Richmond Hill with an average across these major municipalities of $330.

Clearly, relative rank for crime rates is not always directly correlated with spending rank. For example, Kingston in 2022 ranks first out of these 29 Ontario municipalities for the total crime rate but 12th for policing costs per capita. On the other hand, Brantford, which ranks 2nd in the total crime rate also ranks 2nd for policing costs. Toronto ranks 14th when for crime rate but 3rd for police costs per capita. And so forth.

This of course raises the question—is there a relationship between crime rates and policing costs? The final chart below takes the total criminal code violations per 100,000 for these major Ontario municipalities and plots them against the net policing costs per capita. Furthermore, a simple linear regression is fitted to the data to quantify the relationship between crime rates and police costs, and it suggest that (on average) higher crime rates in 2022 in Ontario municipalities were associated with more police expenditures per capita. Yet there’s considerable variation in this relationship across municipalities with some further from the regression line than others.

In the table below, the regression line is used to predict what net police costs per capita based on the crime rate in 2022 should be for each of these municipalities with comparison to the actual spending. The results, ranked by the size of the difference between actual minus predicted, suggest there are some quite large differences with Thunder Bay, Toronto, Barrie and Brantford showing the largest positive differences between actual and predicted while Cambridge, Waterloo, Chatham-Kent and London spending the largest amounts below their predicted value. Of course, the caveat with these results is that they control for nothing aside from the crime rate and do not consider extenuating factors such as geographic size of the municipality or demographic composition or the composition of crime rates themselves.

Actual Versus Predicted Net Policing Costs Per Capita

Nonetheless, there are some takeaways from all this.

First, while Ontario has seen an increase in overall crime rates since 2014, rates remain low by historical measures going back several decades and they vary widely across municipalities. Second, policing costs per capita are positively correlated with crime rates in Ontario’s major municipalities—but again, those policing costs (like the crime rates themselves) vary across municipalities. And there’s not always a direct correspondence between a community’s rank in its crime rates and its rank in relative policing costs. Finally, some communities are spending more than what a simple regression of police costs per capita on crime rates would predict and some are spending less. This suggests that if crime rates continue to rise, some municipalities would do well to better understand why their costs seem to be higher than other municipalities even given similar crime rates.