GGR377 - J.Lee
A look into the interplay between crime and mental health within Toronto neighbourhoods
Toronto: Neighbourhood Crime & Mental Health
Introduction: Crime & Mental Health
Both crime and mental health are becoming prevalent and urgent issues within society. To successfully mitigate the negative consequences of these issues, it is crucial to establish a profound understanding of the problem at hand. Intuitively, crime and mental health appear to be connected with one another. The presence of crime can have devastating impacts on one's mental health, and poor mental health can be a potential driver for crime. In line with this intuition, an in-depth systematic review of 63 empirical studies finds that higher exposure to neighbourhood crime is associated with poorer mental health among the residents of that neighbourhood (Baranyi et al., 2021). Given this, there does seem to be a relationship between crime and mental health. Now, the question is: Does this relationship hold within Toronto neighbourhoods?
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This online project aims to answer this question. The more specific question it looks to answer is: Is there a correlation between exposure to neighbourhood crime and the number of mental health and addiction-related visits to the emergency department (ED)?
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Through this project, the ultimate goal is to:
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Cultivate a better understanding about crime and mental health within Toronto and its neighbourhoods
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Uncover the neighbourhoods or areas where policies, interventions, or services – that can help mitigate the negative effects of crime and mental health-related issues – would be most beneficial
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To achieve this goal, this project provides:
Data & A Note on Ethics
Data
The data used within the analyses of this project are listed below. Click on the buttons to view and access each data source.
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Toronto Police Open Data Portal
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Data: Neighbourhood Crime Rates
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For this analysis, neighbourhood crime counts across several categories (i.e. assaults, bike thefts, auto thefts, break and enters, etc.) from 2018-20 were aggregrated to consider overall crime.
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The years 2018-20 were considered to ensure that the crime data is consistent with the mental health data.
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Ontario Community Health Profiles Partnership (OCHPP) Data
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Data: Mental Health & Addiction-related Visits to the Emergency Department (ED)
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The exact dataset can be found under the “Emergency Department Care” section in the “Data Topic Category” column.
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The file is the 2018-20 version of the “Mental Health and Addiction-related ED visits” data.
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This analysis utilized ED-visits data collected over three years (2018-20) for individuals (both male and female) ages 20+.
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A Note On Ethics
Though this project and its analyses were conducted with careful consideration, there are a few concerns surrounding ethics that should be made clear and addressed.
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First, although this project was carried out with the betterment of Toronto and its residents in mind, it uses data that has been derived through the challenging and difficult events of others. Crime and mental health are very sensitive topics and leveraging such information for the purpose of research is always an ethical concern.
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Second, this project uses sensitive data which always comes with a risk of being breached, no matter how carefully it is collected, and placing others at risk is always an ethical concern. As crime and mental health data entail personal, identifying information, a breach could have harmful or damaging consequences on the lives and futures of those involved as well as their families.
Lastly, the compelling nature of this work's observations may result in making decisions prematurely, and this often poses an ethical dilemma. The question of when to stop the research and start taking action is always a balancing act to consider, and given the always-existent risk of not being thorough enough, one needs be aware of the ethical issue of making choices without enough accountability.