Scarborough, the notorious neighborhood in Toronto, may not deserve its bad reputation.

The Toronto Star reports,

As for policing, Scarborough has 20 per cent of the city’s police officers but 24 per cent of the population. But the students also found that Scarborough has a lower crime rate than the rest of the city, which might explain the lighter policing.

Some people might want to know where the less crime fact comes from. They got their data from the Toronto Police Annual Statistic Report.

They were able to do this because police Divisions 41, 42 and 43 conform to the old city of Scarborough, so we can add up crime and population in those division and compare it with crime and population in all other divisions. Now I slightly disagree with their numbers, for some reason they use 2001 population from the census as opposed to the 2006 estimates in the actual report. Here’s a table comparing their numbers and my numbers for the Toronto crime rate (excluding traffic offences):

	My Numbers	Their Numbers
All Toronto	7.41%	7.19%
Non-Scarborough	7.8%	7.64%
Scarborough	6.18%	5.77%

As you can see, the numbers are in the same ballpark– Scarborough has less crime. Nor is this a case of Scarborough having less, say, credit card fraud and being a violent hellhole. Here’s another chart, this one of the violent crime rate:

	My Numbers
All Toronto	1.26%
Non-Scarborough	1.31%
Scarborough	1.12%

So it seems the study was right, Scarborough is unfairly maligned.