Canada has no single national crime API like the UK’s data.police.uk. National figures come from Statistics Canada’s Web Data Service, which returns totals for provinces, metro areas and police services, never for streets. Incident-level data with coordinates exists only where a city police service publishes it, and only a handful do so under an open licence that allows commercial reuse: Montréal, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax.
Checked by the Canada Crime Map Editorial Team in October 2026. Example API calls below were run on 24 October 2026 and returned the results shown. Licence notes summarise the publishers’ own terms; read the licence yourself before building a product on any dataset. This is not legal advice.
Key facts
- Statistics Canada offers a free REST API (the Web Data Service, WDS) with JSON output and full-table CSV downloads. No key is needed.
- StatCan crime data is aggregated and annual: Canada, provinces, census metropolitan areas (CMAs) and individual police services. There is no neighbourhood or street level.
- open.canada.ca runs CKAN and exposes the standard Action API (GET only). A search for crime and police returns mostly Statistics Canada tables, not police incident files.
- Street-level data comes from city police portals, mostly built on Esri ArcGIS, which you can query through ArcGIS REST endpoints.
- Every police service moves incident locations to a nearby intersection, block or area for privacy, so no Canadian source gives exact addresses.
Canada vs the UK police API
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, one API serves street-level crime for every police force in the same format. Canada’s system is different because policing is split between municipal services, provincial forces and the RCMP, and each publishes (or doesn’t publish) its own data. The practical result for developers:
| Need | UK | Canada |
|---|---|---|
| National, consistent incidents | data.police.uk | None |
| City or regional totals | ONS tables | Statistics Canada WDS |
| Street-level points | Same national API | Separate portal per city, different fields and licences |
| Licence | Open Government Licence | Varies by publisher; some forbid commercial use |
1. Statistics Canada Web Data Service (national and city totals)
The Web Data Service is the official API for everything Statistics Canada publishes, including police-reported crime from the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey. Methods include getDataFromVectorsAndLatestNPeriods, getBulkVectorDataByRange, getCubeMetadata and getFullTableDownloadCSV. It returns JSON, and there is an SDMX service for XML.
The quickest way to get crime data is to download a whole table. This call returns a link to the zipped CSV for the Crime Severity Index table:
GET https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/wds/rest/getFullTableDownloadCSV/35100026/en
{"status":"SUCCESS","object":"https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/tbl/csv/35100026-eng.zip"}Useful crime tables (product IDs) include:
- 35100026: Crime Severity Index and weighted clearance rates for Canada, provinces, territories and CMAs.
- 35100177: incident-based crime statistics by detailed violation, for the same geographies.
- 35100188, 35100190, 35100063: Crime Severity Index by police service in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia (other provinces have their own tables).
- 35100066 and 35100067: police-reported hate crime by motivation and by violation.
For repeated queries, use vector IDs with getDataFromVectorsAndLatestNPeriods; open-source wrappers exist for Python (stats_can) and R (cansim).
Limits. Data is released once a year, usually in late July, for the previous calendar year. The latest figures are for 2025, released 22 July 2026. The smallest unit is a police service, so you get one number for a whole city. Licence: Statistics Canada Open Licence, which allows commercial use with attribution.
2. Open Government Portal (open.canada.ca) CKAN API
The federal Open Government Portal uses CKAN, so it supports the standard Action API with no key. It only accepts GET requests, with parameters in the URL:
GET https://open.canada.ca/data/en/api/3/action/package_search?q=crime%20police&rows=10When we ran this query it returned 99 datasets, and the top results were Statistics Canada tables (hate crime, police personnel, Crime Severity Index by police service) under the Open Government Licence – Canada. The portal is a good catalogue for finding federal tables, but it is not a feed of police incidents: city police services publish their incident data on their own portals, not here.
3. City police open data (street-level points)
This is the only route to crime by location. Most portals run on Esri ArcGIS Hub, so each dataset has a FeatureServer endpoint you can query with standard ArcGIS REST parameters (where, outFields, geometry, resultOffset, f=json or f=geojson).
Toronto Police Service
The Public Safety Data Portal publishes Major Crime Indicators (now labelled Community Safety Indicators), homicides, shootings, bicycle and vehicle theft, and neighbourhood rates. The main dataset goes back to 2014. A count query on its FeatureServer:
GET https://services.arcgis.com/S9th0jAJ7bqgIRjw/ArcGIS/rest/services/Major_Crime_Indicators_Open_Data/FeatureServer/0/query?where=1%3D1&returnCountOnly=true&f=json
{"count":497606}Licence: Open Government Licence – Ontario (Toronto Police Service). Note that the downloadable open dataset lags the live year-to-date map by roughly a quarter, and locations are offset to the nearest intersection.
Ottawa Police Service
The Community Safety Data Portal offers criminal offences, shootings, auto theft, bike theft, hate crime and more, as CSV, GeoJSON and ArcGIS services, plus a search API for finding datasets. Licence: Open Government Licence – Ottawa Police Service. When we last checked, the incident datasets ran to the end of 2025 rather than updating daily.
Montréal (SPVM)
The Actes criminels dataset on Données Québec (a CKAN portal) is the most current open crime feed in Canada, with updates close to daily. It covers property crime and a few violent categories only (no assaults or sexual offences), with dates, police station and approximate coordinates. Licence: CC BY 4.0.
Halifax Regional Police
Halifax publishes crime incidents on its ArcGIS open data hub under the Open Government Licence – Halifax. The feed is recent but holds only a short rolling window, so anyone building a history needs to archive it on a schedule.
Vancouver, Calgary and other cities
- Vancouver. Crime data is published by the Vancouver Police Department through GeoDASH, not as an API on the City’s open-data portal. GeoDASH Open Data offers downloadable files aimed at researchers and media, and the VPD warns its counts use an “all violations” method that is not comparable with Statistics Canada. We did not find an explicit open licence allowing commercial reuse.
- Calgary. The Calgary Police Service publishes monthly community crime and disorder statistics through its Community Safety Dashboard and reports. The community crime dataset that used to be on the City’s open-data portal was not publicly accessible when we last checked in October 2026.
- Others. Edmonton, Winnipeg, Regina, Peel, York, Durham and many more have public maps or statistics pages. Several restrict commercial reuse or offer no machine-readable feed, so check each one. Our Canada crime map hub links to each service’s official tools.
Licence summary
| Source | Level | Freshness | Commercial reuse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Statistics Canada WDS | Province, CMA, police service | Annual (2025 data, July 2026) | Yes, with attribution |
| open.canada.ca CKAN | Catalogue of mostly federal tables | Varies | Yes (OGL – Canada) for most |
| Montréal SPVM | Point (offset) | Near daily | Yes (CC BY 4.0) |
| Toronto Police | Point (intersection) | About 3 months behind | Yes (OGL – Ontario, TPS) |
| Ottawa Police | Point (offset) | To end of 2025 when checked | Yes (OGL – Ottawa Police Service) |
| Halifax | Point (offset) | Recent, short window | Yes (OGL – Halifax) |
| Vancouver VPD GeoDASH | Point (block) | Weekdays | No explicit licence found |
Each licence requires a specific attribution line. We list the exact wording we use on our data sources and licences page.
How to build a Canadian crime map: a practical approach
- Use Statistics Canada as the base layer. It covers almost all of the population consistently, so every city gets an honest overall score, even where no street data exists.
- Add street-level points only where the licence allows. Montréal, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax are the clear cases today.
- Normalise categories. Each city names offences differently; map them to a small shared set (for example break-in, vehicle theft, robbery, assault) before comparing.
- Archive feeds yourself. Some portals keep only recent records or replace files in place.
- Show freshness and offsets. Tell users the date of the latest record and that points are approximate.
If you just want ready-made numbers, our free crime data download has 2025 Crime Severity Index figures for all 41 metro areas as a CSV, and our methodology explains how we use them.
Crime data on your phone
Safety App combines official crime data with walking routes that avoid high-risk areas and one-tap SOS alerts to the people you trust. Coming soon to Android and iPhone in Canada.
Canada crime data API FAQ
Is there a Canadian version of data.police.uk?
No. There is no national API for street-level crime in Canada. Statistics Canada provides national and city totals, and individual police services publish their own incident data, each with its own format and licence.
Does Statistics Canada have a crime API?
Yes. The Web Data Service is a free REST API that returns Statistics Canada tables, including the Crime Severity Index and police-reported crime by violation. It does not need an API key, but its data stops at the police-service level and is updated once a year.
Which Canadian cities have open crime data with coordinates?
Montréal, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax publish incident-level data with approximate locations under open licences that allow commercial reuse. Vancouver publishes downloadable data through GeoDASH but without an explicit open licence.
Can I get crime data by postal code in Canada?
Not from an official source. Police data is offset to intersections, blocks or neighbourhoods, and Statistics Canada stops at the city level. You can count points within a postal-code area yourself for cities that publish point data.
How often is Canadian crime data updated?
Statistics Canada updates once a year, in late July. City portals vary from near daily (Montréal) to several months behind (Toronto’s open download) or annual updates.
Related: Data sources and licences · Canada crime data for journalists (free CSV) · Methodology · Canada crime map · Toronto crime map · Ottawa crime map · Montréal crime map · Numbeo vs Statistics Canada · How to check crime in your neighbourhood · Crime rate in Canada.