Overview of crime in Toronto
Crime in Toronto has been low in comparison to other major cities. In 2024, a ranking of 60 large cities by "The Economist" ranked Toronto as the 6th safest major city in the world, and the safest major city in North America. In the same year, CEOWORLD magazine, which includes some major medium-sized cities, ranked Toronto as the 160th safest city in the world, running behind several other major cities including Taipei, Munich, and Jerusalem, as well as, in Canada, Quebec City and Ottawa, but safer than most cities in the United States.
Even though Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America, it has a relatively low homicide rate that has fluctuated over the 2010s decade between 2.1 and 3.8 per 100,000 people. This is worse than most of Europe, but comparable to modern day New York. This is also lower than other major cities such as Atlanta (19.0), Chicago (18.5), Boston (9.0), San Francisco (8.6), New York City (5.1), and San Jose (4.6). In 2007, Toronto's robbery rate also ranked relatively high, with 407.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (366.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3), San Diego (158.8), and Portland (150.5).
While homicide rates in Toronto were relatively low for several years, they started to increase in 2016 until Toronto experienced the highest homicide rate among major Canadian cities in 2018; in that single year, the city surpassed the homicide rate of New York City. Homicide rates declined again in 2019; when compared across major metropolitan areas, the Greater Toronto Area ranked ninth in Canada with a homicide rate of 2.26 per 100,000.
Late 1980s and early 1990s.
In the late 1980s, gangs in Toronto were becoming increasingly violent. This coincided with the arrival of crack cocaine in the city, which caused more gun violence to occur in low-income neighborhoods. In 1988, Toronto Police were under scrutiny for a series of shootings of unarmed black men, dating back to the late 1970s. In 1991, Toronto experienced its most violent year with 89 murders (that murder tally was surpassed in 2018), 16 of which were linked to drug wars involving rival gangs. Much of the high murder toll of 1991 was due to a gang war in Chinatown between various Chinese gangs for the control of the drug trade.
On May 4, 1992, there were riots on Yonge Street, which followed peaceful protesting of a fatal shooting of a black man who was swinging a knife at a police officer. This was the eighth shooting of an assailant in four years, and fourth fatal one. Later that year, local activist Dudley Laws claimed that police bias against blacks was worse in Toronto than in Los Angeles.
Late 1990s.
Toronto recorded 49 homicides in 1999, which, as of , remains the city's lowest homicide total since 1986. That year, there were a total of 90 homicides across Toronto's census metropolitan area, with a murder rate of 1.68 per 100,000 people.
2005–2014: "Year of the Gun", shootings and the falling murder rate.
In 2005, Toronto media coined the term "Year of the Gun" because the number of gun-related homicides reached a record 52 out of 80 murders in total; almost double the 27 gun deaths recorded the previous year.
On December 26, 2005, 15-year-old Jane Creba was shot and killed in the Boxing Day shooting while shopping on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto. After this incident, many people called for the federal government to ban handguns in Canada; this also became an issue in the 2006 federal election, but the number of homicides dropped to 70 in 2006.
However, 2007 saw another, smaller wave of gun violence starting in May with the shooting death of 15-year-old Jordan Manners at his school, C. W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute. A couple of months later, on July 22, 2007, 11-year-old Ephraim Brown was killed after being shot in the neck by a stray bullet, during a gang shooting in the city's North York district at Jane Street and Sheppard Avenue. These events raised calls for a ban on handguns once again. Of the 86 murders in 2007, half were via firearm; thus, Toronto had a murder rate of about 3.43 per 100,000, slightly less than the peak rate of 3.9 in 1991. There was a drop in murders again in 2008 with 70 (a total of 105 murders in the Greater Toronto Area – including a record high 27 occurring in neighbouring Peel Region (with Mississauga having a record 18 homicides, but statistically this was an anomalous year for Peel Region as a whole).
The falling murder totals continued in 2009 with 65, followed by 63 in 2010, then the lowest total in recent times with only 51 (75 total in the GTA) in 2011, the lowest homicide total since 1986 at a rate of 2.0 per 100,000, close to the national average, representing a further dramatic decline in the city's murder rate for the fourth consecutive year. The number of homicides stabilized to the mid-50s for the next 4 years. Overall, shooting incidents also declined, from 335 occurrences in 2010 to 255 reported in 2013, and reaching a decade-low 196 for 2014. Since 2014, gun violence has been steadily rising, with 395 shootings in 2017, 427 in 2018, and as well almost 500 in 2019. 
2015–present.
After a substantial decrease in homicides after the 2005 "year of the gun" and a stable period 2009–2015, the murder rate in Toronto started to increase again drastically in 2016. The homicide rate jumped to 75 homicides in 2016 and spiked in 2018 with 98 homicides in 2018, which is partially due to the Toronto van attack, which resulted in the murder of 10 people on April 23. This increased Toronto's homicide rate to around 3.6 per 100,000 people in 2018, the highest among major Canadian cities and higher than New York City (around 3.51 per 100,000) for the same year. The homicide total dropped again in 2019 to 80 (a rate of 2.9 per 100,000 people) below the rate of most US cities, but still higher than the Canadian average of 1.8. 2020 saw another decrease in homicides with the city having a total of 71 murders for the year (a rate of around 2.6 per 100,000 people). However in 2021, the city saw an increase in homicides, with the city murders increasing to 85, giving Toronto a homicide rate of 3.04 per 100,000 people. A decrease in murders happened the following year with 71 being reported in 2022 (a murder rate of 2.5 per 100,000), which was then followed by a slight increase with 73 homicides being reported in 2023, giving the city a murder rate of 2.6 per 100,000 people. 2024 saw another increase in homicides with 85 being reported in the year, giving the city a homicide rate of around 3.04 per 100,000 residents.
In conjunction with that increase in murders, overall shooting incidents also increased from a low of 177 in 2014 to an all-time high of 495 in 2019, even outpacing gun incidents that occurred in 2018. The high number of shooting incidents in 2019, resulted in the city having a shooting rate of 18.1 per 100,000 people, which was double the shooting rate of New York City in the same year (9.1 per 100,000 residents). After the peak in 2019, the city saw a consistent decline in shootings for next years dropping all the way to 345 shooting incidents in 2023. The following year saw a 33.6% increase in shootings with 461 being reported throughout 2024. At the same time, gun deaths increased from a low of 22 in 2013 to a high of 51 in 2018 and dropped slightly to 44 in 2019, followed by another downtick gun deaths with 39 in 2020. 2021 saw an increase in gun murders with 46, followed by a decrease the next year with 44 in 2022. 
Organized crime.
Victorian-Edwardian era.
Large criminal organizations have been operating in the Toronto region since at least the mid-19th century, beginning with the homegrown, yet short-lived Markham Gang. Since that time, large-scale organized crime in Toronto has mostly been the domain of international or foreign-based crime syndicates. From the late 18th century and continuing well into the 20th century, Toronto was a city mostly inhabited by Protestants of British extraction. In the Victorian age and for some time afterward, Toronto came to be known as "Toronto the Good". Toronto in the first half of the 20th century was a city whose population was of overwhelmingly Anglo-Irish descent as the 1941 census showed that people whose families originated from the British isles made up 86% of the population while people whose families originated elsewhere made up 13% of the population. Not until the 1950-1960s following changes in immigration law did a significant number of people of non-British origin began to settle in Toronto, gradually changing Toronto from a city whose people were mostly of British descent into a city that is one of the most multicultural in North America.
Reflecting the influence of Victorian values, in Toronto as elsewhere in Canada laws were passed to regulate social behavior. Drugs such as cocaine and marijuana together with gambling were banned, prostitution was cracked down upon, and access to alcohol was limited. A British visitor to Toronto in 1896 stated: "Sunday is as melancholy and suicidal sort of day as Puritan principles can make it". As part of the effort to regulate social behavior, the Toronto police force went from 172 officers in 1872 to 600 officers by 1914. The majority of the Toronto policemen in this period were British immigrants with a disproportionate number of the police force being Ulster Protestants. The growth of the police force was due not to an increase in crime "per se", but rather due to an increase in laws regulating social behavior as the major concerns of the Toronto police went from being burglary, vagrancy and breaking up fistfights in 1872 to enforcing laws regarding censorship, Sabbath-breaking, dance halls, gambling, alcohol consumption, street traffic, and all forms of "immorality" by 1914. One journalist, Harry Wodson, wrote that "Toronto the Good" was a city of "shall nots" as the city council had passed 6,000 bylaws regulating all forms of social behavior. Such laws created opportunities for organized crime which moved in to fill the demand for what at least certain segments of the population wanted, but were not legally able to enjoy.
The principal concern of the Toronto police in the early 20th century was a moral panic that prostitution was increasing as it was widely believed that organized crime was engaging in sexual slavery by kidnapping young women and forcing them into prostitution. The Canadian historian Charlotte Gray noted in fact most of the prostitutes in Toronto were not forced into sexual slavery, but rather chose to engage in prostitution due to poverty as many occupations were closed to women and wages in those that were open to women were significantly lower than offered to men. The area of Toronto that the newspapers were mostly concerned was an impoverished district known as "the Ward" that was bordered by College, Jarvis, University and Yonge streets. "The Ward" was mostly inhabited by Italian, Jewish, Finnish, Polish, West Indian and Chinese immigrants that was painted in lurid terms by the newspapers as a center of organized crime add depravity in general that was threatening society. Gray cautioned that such newspaper coverage of "the Ward" reflected more the prejudices of the era than its reality.
By the early 1900s, the infamous "Black Hand" had followed Italian immigrants to Toronto as it had in most major North American cities at the time. In 1907, in a much publicized case, a wealthy Toronto woman received a letter demanding she pay $500 to the "Brotherhood of the Black Hand" while warning if she contracted the police or the media "you and your husband will be murdered and your house will be blown up".
The Magaddino ascendency.
Italian organized crime remains prevalent, with the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta such as the Siderno Group, as well as the Sicilian Mafia. During prohibition, Toronto became a major center for bootlegging operations into the United States, which also saw an increased presence of Italian-American organized crime — specifically the Buffalo crime family. The most important gangsters in Toronto area in the 1920s