MethodologyWhat these numbers are, where they come from, and what they can and cannot tell you.

Where the data comes from

Dispatchr ingests public dispatch feeds published by emergency services agencies. These feeds list dispatched calls for service — the incidents an agency sent resources to — with a call type, a time, and an approximate location. Agencies pre-filter sensitive records (for example, calls involving personal privacy concerns) before publication, and Explore applies aggregation on top of that. Current sources:

Cities appear here once their feed fully covers a calendar month with meaningful volume; more are added over time.

What "aggregate" means here

Explore pages show counts, category breakdowns, and time patterns for a labeled calendar month — never individual events, addresses, or anything that could identify a specific incident or person. Categories rare enough to point at a single incident are rolled into combined totals rather than itemized. The Dispatchr app shows recent events on a map with more detail; Explore is deliberately a statistical summary.

How events are counted

Each statistic covers exactly the calendar month named on the page, computed in the agency's local time zone. Call types are harmonized: agencies use varying labels for similar incidents, and Dispatchr maps them to a consistent set of categories (the same categories used in the app). "Priority calls" counts events with the two most urgent priority levels on Dispatchr's 1–5 priority scale, which is assigned from the call type.

How neighbourhood attribution works

Every call with reliable coordinates is tested against the city's official neighbourhood boundary polygons (for Toronto, the city's 158-neighbourhood structure). A call counts toward a neighbourhood only if its coordinates fall inside that neighbourhood's polygon. Calls with missing or unreliable coordinates — for example, where geocoding fell back to a default location — are excluded from neighbourhood totals but still count in citywide figures. A small share of calls fall outside every polygon (waterways, airport lands, boundary edges) and appear only in citywide totals.

Limitations — read this part

Dispatch data is not crime data. A dispatched call is an initial report and response, not an investigation outcome; the initial call type may differ from what actually happened, and many calls (alarms, medical assists, wellbeing checks) involve no offence at all. Call volumes also reflect reporting behaviour and agency policy, not just underlying activity. Comparing neighbourhoods by call volume alone ignores population, land use, and visitor traffic — a downtown core with heavy foot traffic will record more calls than a residential area with the same number of residents.

Feeds are published by agencies on differing schedules, and Explore statistics are compiled after a month completes. Each page states its data period and generation date; treat the numbers as a summary of that period, not a description of the present moment.

Updates

Explore pages are regenerated after each calendar month, keeping the same web addresses with refreshed statistics. The current data period across the site is June 2026.

Attribution & licensing

Toronto: Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Ontario. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Toronto.

Nashville: Data source: Metro Nashville Police Department open data.

Las Vegas: Data source: Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department open data.

Medicine Hat: Data source: City of Medicine Hat open data.

San Francisco: Data source: City and County of San Francisco open data.

Dallas: Contains data from the Dallas Police Department, licensed under the Open Data Commons Attribution License.

Cincinnati: Data source: City of Cincinnati open data.

Chicago: Data source: Chicago Police Department / City of Chicago open data.

Detroit: Data source: Detroit Police Department open data.

Vancouver: Data source: Vancouver Police Department open data.

Brampton: Data source: Peel Regional Police open data.

Mississauga: Data source: Peel Regional Police open data.

Vaughan: Data source: York Regional Police open data.

Dispatchr is not affiliated with or endorsed by any emergency services agency.