Vancouver's crime data, made legible.

The Vancouver Police Department publishes every founded crime incident back to 2003. It's public — but it lives in zip files. This is a friendlier window onto the same data: the long-run trends, how the city's neighbourhoods differ, and where things are actually recorded.

What this is and isn't. A community view of open data — not a safety score. Counts reflect recorded, founded incidents, not every call to police, and locations are deliberately approximate (see the notes & sources).

Recorded incidents over time

By category

Busiest neighbourhoods

All neighbourhoods →

What is this data, exactly?

Founded incidents — confirmed, not just reported. Every count here is a “founded” incident: a report the VPD investigated and confirmed that a violation actually occurred. So it's stronger than a 911 call or a complaint, but it is not a court conviction — it sits in between. It also doesn't capture crime never reported to police.

Eleven broad categories. The VPD groups everything into 11 categories. “Offence Against a Person” is deliberately broad — it rolls up assault, robbery, sexual assault, and domestic violence into one bucket so individual sensitive cases can't be re-identified. For a sexual-violence breakdown we use Statistics Canada instead — see the Sexual violence card under Categories.

Locations are approximate. Property-crime points are placed at the hundred-block; violent incidents have their location and time removed entirely. Treat the map as “roughly where,” never “exactly where.”

Not the same as Statistics Canada. The headline counts come straight from the VPD's open data. Statistics Canada (used in Compare and for sexual violence) counts differently and covers a wider area, so the two don't line up.

The map

Shade shows how many incidents each neighbourhood has recorded; dots are individual property & traffic incidents (placed at the block, so they're approximate). Pick a category and year to explore.

Category Year Show individual incidents

Crime categories

The VPD groups incidents into eleven categories. Violent categories are intentionally broad and location-protected — shown as totals only. The last card, Sexual violence, comes from Statistics Canada, because the VPD folds it into “Offence Against a Person.”