Crime Rates and Covid Waves

The Covid pandemic kept people at home but increased social stress, creating the potential for both increases and decreases in criminal behaviour. In the United States and many parts of Canada, the end result was higher crime. But the story in Toronto was different, as serious crime generally ebbed during the pandemic.

The Toronto Police Service releases consistent neighbourhood data on six major crimes: homicides, assaults, robberies, burglaries, auto thefts, and other thefts of over $5,000. By comparing the rates of these crimes over time with the different waves of Covid cases, and the last year before the pandemic, we can see a new threat displacing the old.

This analysis spans 2019 to 2021. The maps below are divided into five periods representing the last 12 months before the pandemic, then the first four major waves of it: wild type, Alpha variant, Beta and Delta. (Complete data is not yet available for the Omicron period.)

Longstanding hotspots—downtown and marginalized communities in the northwest—continued to stand out on the maps, but still saw relative declines in crime rate. The largest drop by far was in the Bay Street corridor, reflecting vastly reduced foot traffic to the offices in the country's main financial district. A sustained lull in crime was also observed in working-class Scarborough (wards 20–25).

Even as life slowly returned to normal by the time of the Delta variant, which did not hit Toronto particularly hard thanks to good vaccine coverage, major crime stayed below pre-pandemic levels, with 89 of the city's 140 neighbourhoods registering decreases of 21 percent on average.

The remaining 51 neighbourhoods had an average increase of 14 percent, including middle-class areas in southern Etobicoke (ward 3) and the Bathurst Street corridor in north-central Toronto, partly driven by a trend of organized car thefts.

It's hard to say exactly why Toronto escaped the crime surge that many other cities experienced during Covid. It's traditionally assumed that crime is a symptom of broader problems like unemployment and anomie, two things the pandemic clearly aggravated.

Ontario boasted the title of "world's most locked-down jurisdiction", and in this respect the example of Bay Street proves that people staying home has a positive impact on crime rates, rather than leading to a disorderly collapse of moral inhibitions as some have theorized.

Furthermore, while Canada's emergency welfare spending was unexceptional by G7 standards, the programs evidently did take the edge off the financial desperation that can fuel robberies and thefts, if not enough to equalize crime rates between Toronto's richer and poorer neighbourhoods.