Abstract

This project seeks to examine the spatial and temporal patterning of commercial robberies that occurred between 2014 to 2018 in the City of Toronto, Ontario. Robbery is a predominantly urban crime and one of the few police-reported offences with higher rates in southern than in northern Canada (Allen & Perreault, 2015 as cited in Allen, 2018). Furthermore, it is a serious indictable offence that impacts the mobility, security, and socio-economic factors of victimized individual(s) and/or communities. While the rate of robbery has been increasing since 2015, the attention and focus of the general public has remained on other forms of violent crime such as homicide and sexual assaults. Accordingly, we have chosen to focus our study on robberies to shift the focus from the more researched forms of violent crime in order to add value to the identified gap in research concerning robberies. Robberies are generally conducted based on risk and reward, low risk and high reward. In the context of commercial robberies, cash-intensive facilities are preferred regardless of their hours of activity and temporal factors such as seasonality provide little deterrence from the occurrence of these events.