The latest report on police-reported crime statistics indicates that rates for almost all violent crimes have increased in Canada; this includes increased rates of police-reported incidents of homicide, sexual assault, and robbery (Allen, 2018). Conversely, the overall volume and severity of non-violent crime remained unchanged, with increases in motor vehicle theft and stolen property being offset by a decline in other offences. As well, the recent legalization of recreational marijuana is predicted to further decrease the rate of drug-related crime (Statista, 2018). As a result, public concern has largely focused on the perceived increase in levels of violent crime. This is suspected to be influenced by the role of media in shaping public attitudes toward violent crime, with media outlets reporting headlines that suggest the following: “the highest homicide rate in [number of years]”; “record murder numbers”; and so on. While opinion polls indicate that Canadians reject this notion and instead believe their attitudes are merely reflective of the trend in violent crime (Department of Justice, 2015), violent crime is still more commonly associated with homicide, attempted murder, assault, and sexual assault than other offences under this category such as robbery.
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. The rate of robbery has been increasing in Canada since 2015 and has been a key contributor to increases in the Violent Crime Severity Index, with noted differences if observed at different scales (e.g., provinces and territory). For example, in 2017, the rate of robbery increased by 10 per cent in Ontario. However, this increased trend was mostly overlooked by the general public unlike other offences related to violent crime. Accordingly, we have chosen to focus our study on robberies to shift the focus from the more researched forms of violent crime (e.g., homicide and sexual assault) in order to add value to the identified gap in research concerning robberies.
Toronto, Ontario was chosen as our study area due to accessibility of geospatial data, as well as the lack of scholarly research examining the spatial and temporal dimensions of robberies in Toronto. Furthermore, from our Nearest Neighbour Analysis of commercial, residential, and outside robberies, we chose to narrow our focus to commercial robberies for our study. Given the evidence that crime events exhibit both a spatial and temporal pattern (Hipp & Kim, 2019), we chose to explore the following research questions: Is there evidence of spatial clustering of commercial robbery? What is the relationship between space and time, if any, on occurrences of commercial robbery?