See Attachment
In the early 2000’s the City of Toronto was experiencing a serious increase in gang related violence which resulted in elevated homicides rates. This crime wave spurred action from former Mayor David Miller to take a strong stance against gang violence and vowed to reduce crime and particularly homicides in the City.
This project assessed the change in homicides from 2004-20014 to assess if the anti homicide campaign had any affect on homicides in the City. To solve this problem, homicides were mapped for 2004 and 2014 across the City as point data. The homicides were also mapped by city ward to investigate how the number of homicides changed by ward from one-time period to the next. From this, you can see that certain wards did in fact see a reduction in the number of homicides from 2004 - 2014.
To gain a better idea of how the number of homicides changed between 2004 and 20014 the kernel density of homicides was then computed for both years to understand which areas of the city had high occurrences of homicides. Once these two layers were created the 2004 kernel density layer was subtracted from the 2014 kernel density layer resulting in a map displaying how the homicide epicentres changed between 2004 and 2014. From this map it is clear that homicides were significantly reduced in some areas while increasing in other areas. This could be the result of the mayor’s anti crime plan however it is more likely due to gentrification which occurred during this time period. This is supported by the fact that the actual number of homicide remained the same between 2004 and 2014 at 44 homicides city wide.