This paper explores police stop and search practices in Toronto using the 2003-2012 data from Toronto Police Service. The findings demonstrate that for black youth, the number of stops and the stops/arrests ratios increased significantly by 42.7% and 44.9% respectively between 2003 and 2012, while for white youth, both indices decreased steadily during the same period. Moreover, they show that police stops of black youth occur most excessively in neighbourhoods where more white people reside and/or have higher crime rates. This article argues for the importance of a contextualized examination of police stops within the spatial context of neighbourhoods and calls for open and free access to police stop data, regular internal review by police, and community policing in Toronto.
This paper presents a Geographic Information System based Multicriteria Decision Making approach for evaluating accessibility to public parks in Calgary, Alberta. The approach involves the weighted linear combination with the entropy weighting method for obtaining the criterion (attribute) weights. The paper demonstrates a core-periphery pattern of accessibility to public parks in Calgary. Furthermore, the pattern has shown tendency to be more polarized between the year of 2006 and 2011. The results of this research can help the park planning authorities in identifying the needs for improving the accessibility to public parks, monitoring the changes of accessibility patterns over time, and locating new public parks. The results can also help the general public to better understand the spatial relationship between their neighbourhoods and public parks in the city.