Is Etobicoke Safe? An Honest Look at the Numbers (2026)

Last updated 9 August 2026. All crime figures below are Toronto Police Service open data for calendar year 2025 — the most recent complete year published — and are rates per 100,000 residents unless stated otherwise. Sources and links are at the bottom.

Is Etobicoke safe compared to the rest of Toronto?

Here is the honest comparison. I have added up the reported counts for all 22 Etobicoke neighbourhoods in the Toronto Police Service Neighbourhood Crime Rates dataset for 2025 and worked them out per 100,000 residents, using the same population figures the dataset itself uses.

Three of the four are at or below the city average. One is not, and it is the one Etobicoke residents actually complain about: cars.

Etobicoke is not one place. It is three.

Grouping the 22 neighbourhoods into the three chunks locals actually use produces a much more useful picture. South Etobicoke is the lakeshore strip: Alderwood, Long Branch, New Toronto, Mimico-Queensway, Humber Bay Shores and Stonegate-Queensway. Central runs from The Kingsway through Islington and out to the West Mall. North Etobicoke is Rexdale and the Highway 27 belt.

South Etobicoke’s robbery rate is a little over half the city average. Central Etobicoke has the highest break-and-enter rate of the three, which surprises people — but affluent, detached, low-density streets are exactly where residential break-ins happen. North Etobicoke’s numbers are higher across the board, and the auto theft figure there is driven overwhelmingly by one place, which I come to shortly.

The 2025 numbers, neighbourhood by neighbourhood

Rates per 100,000 residents. The last column ranks each neighbourhood against all 158 in Toronto for the five main indicators combined (assault, auto theft, break-and-enter, robbery and theft over $5,000). Rank 1 is the highest rate in the city; rank 158 is the lowest.

* Read the next section before you draw any conclusion from the Mimico-Queensway line.

The Mimico-Queensway number that misleads almost everybody

On paper, Mimico-Queensway has the highest assault rate of any neighbourhood in Toronto — 4,209 per 100,000, five and a half times the city average. That number is real, and it is also close to meaningless as a measure of street safety.

The City of Toronto’s Mimico-Queensway boundary includes the Toronto South Detention Centre at 160 Horner Avenue, a provincial jail. Police record an occurrence where it happened, so assaults between inmates inside the institution land in this neighbourhood’s totals.

You can measure the effect exactly, because the Toronto Police Major Crime Indicators dataset publishes a location type for every record. Of the 1,005 assault records with a 2025 occurrence date in Mimico-Queensway, 898 — just under 90% — carry the location type “Jails / Detention Centres.”

Strip those out and 107 assaults remain, which works out to roughly 444 per 100,000 — comfortably below Toronto’s 768. On the same adjusted basis, Mimico-Queensway’s combined five-indicator rate falls from first in the city to somewhere around 121st of 158.

Auto theft is Etobicoke’s real problem — and it is concentrated

This is the number that deserves attention. Etobicoke’s 2025 auto theft rate of 354 per 100,000 is well above Toronto’s 225, and it is not evenly spread. West Humber-Clairville alone recorded 494 of Etobicoke’s 1,529 auto thefts — nearly a third — at a rate of 1,321 per 100,000, the highest of any neighbourhood in Toronto. Etobicoke City Centre, around Islington and Bloor, was second within Etobicoke at 602.

Two structural facts explain a great deal of that. West Humber-Clairville is the largest of Toronto’s 158 neighbourhoods by land area at roughly 30 square kilometres, and most of it is industrial, commercial and airport-adjacent land wrapped around Highways 27, 409 and 427. A rate calculated against its 37,406 residents does not describe the risk to a homeowner on a residential street there, because a large share of the vehicles stolen were never parked in a driveway.

The genuine good news: Toronto auto theft has fallen sharply for two consecutive years — 12,418 in 2023, 9,551 in 2024, 7,240 in 2025. Etobicoke followed the same curve. If you looked at this topic in 2023 and formed a view, the view is now out of date.

What the numbers do not tell you

I have shown you police data because it is the only Etobicoke-wide safety measure that is public, consistent and auditable. It is also incomplete, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

• Rates use residents, not people present. A neighbourhood with a mall, a hospital, a subway terminal or a highway interchange has far more people in it by day than it has residents. That inflates its per-capita rate without telling you anything about your street.
• Reporting rates differ. Crimes have to be reported to be counted. Rising numbers can reflect rising reporting.
• Small numbers are noisy. Alderwood’s robbery count went from 1 in 2024 to 10 in 2025. As a rate that is a 900% jump. As a fact about a neighbourhood of 14,000 people, it is nine incidents.
• None of this measures the things people mean by “does it feel safe”. Street lighting, sightlines, how busy a sidewalk is at 9pm, whether the underpass has a proper crossing, how fast traffic moves on the arterial. Those matter enormously and appear in no dataset.

How to check a specific Etobicoke street yourself

1. Use the Toronto Police Public Safety Data Portal and its neighbourhood crime maps. It is the same source I used, free, and you can filter to one neighbourhood and one offence type.
2. Visit at three different times. A weekday at 9am, a weekday at 9pm, and a Saturday afternoon. If you only ever see a street on a Sunday viewing, you have seen it at its best.
3. Walk the route you would actually walk. From the GO platform or bus stop to the front door, at night. That walk — not the neighbourhood average — is what you will experience.
4. Look at the physical stuff. Lighting on the side streets, whether the parking garage entrance is overlooked, whether the arterial has a signalised crossing near you. The City’s Vision Zero dashboard maps road-safety data if traffic is your concern.
5. Ask the building. If it is a condo, ask property management about garage security and incident history, and read the status certificate.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Toronto Police Service — Neighbourhood Crime Rates (Open Data). Counts and rates per 100,000 by the City of Toronto’s 158 neighbourhoods; population figures are Environics Analytics projections. 2025 figures accessed 9 August 2026.
• Toronto Police Service — Major Crime Indicators (Open Data). Occurrence-level records including location type; used for the Mimico-Queensway jail analysis.
• Toronto Police Service Public Safety Data Portal — interactive neighbourhood crime maps.
• City of Toronto — Neighbourhood Profiles (boundaries of the 158 neighbourhoods).
• City of Toronto — Vision Zero road safety dashboard.

Read next

• Is Mimico safe? The jail-adjusted numbers
• Is Humber Bay Shores safe?
• Is Long Branch safe?
• Is Alderwood safe?
• Is Stonegate-Queensway safe?
• Living in Etobicoke: a local realtor’s neighbourhood guide
• Etobicoke commute guide · Top 5 parks in Etobicoke · Top 5 schools in Etobicoke

Looking at Etobicoke more broadly? Start with my Etobicoke community guide — the neighbourhoods, what each pocket is like, and where they sit relative to one another.