The Mayoral RecordRECORD . 2026-05-05

How Toronto allocates effort between sworn policing, non-police crisis response, harm reduction, and community-investment programs, and what the comparable-jurisdiction evidence says about the safety outcomes of each mix.

Scenario . Last reviewed 2026-05-04 . Next review 2026-06-01

Who would each mechanism reach?

Each candidate's preferred mix shifts who benefits, on what timeline, and through which mechanism. The literature on police elasticities, civilian crisis response, supervised consumption sites, and public-health violence reduction lets the two paths be compared on the same framework.

Brad Bradford

Bradford's emphasis on hiring more officers, deploying police at every TTC subway station, and prioritizing visible enforcement is directed at riders, residents in high-call-volume neighbourhoods, and small-business operators concerned about disorder. Quasi-experimental research on U.S. police-hiring grants (Mello, 2019) and measurement-error-corrected city panels (Chalfin and McCrary, 2018) finds that marginal additions of police are associated with reductions in serious crime in the range of roughly 0.3 to 0.4 percent for each 1 percent increase in officers. The same literature documents that hiring expansions in the United States have raised low-level arrests for minor offences. Effects materialize in years 1 to 3 and depend on deployment strategy, not headcount alone (College of Policing, 2021).

Olivia Chow

Chow's emphasis on the citywide Toronto Community Crisis Service (TCCS), the Mobile Crisis Intervention Team (MCIT) co-response model, expanded transit-station staffing, and SafeTO youth-prevention spending is directed at people in mental-health crisis, transit riders, and youth in priority neighbourhoods, with reductions in police use of force and emergency-department wait time as the most-evidenced near-term outcomes (Lamanna et al., 2014). The CAHOOTS evaluation (Davis et al., NBER, 2025) and Toronto's own one-year TCCS evaluation (City of Toronto, 2023) show large reductions in arrests for crisis-coded calls and high client satisfaction. The literature is thinner on whether civilian crisis response by itself reduces overall violent crime.

Literature. T3Mello, More COPS, less crime, Journal of Public Economics, 2019 . T3Chalfin and McCrary, Are U.S. Cities Underpoliced?, Review of Economics and Statistics, 2018 . T3Davis, Norris, Schmitt, Shem-Tov, Strickland, Mobile Crisis Response Teams Support Better Policing: Evidence from CAHOOTS, NBER Working Paper 33761, 2025 . T3Marshall, Milloy, Wood, Montaner, Kerr, Reduction in overdose mortality after the opening of North America's first medically supervised safer injecting facility, The Lancet, 2011 . T3Potier et al., Supervised injection services: what has been demonstrated? A systematic literature review, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2014 . T3Williams, Currie, Linden, Donnelly, Addressing gang-related violence in Glasgow, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 2014 . T3Fraser and Gillon, The Glasgow miracle? Storytelling, violence reduction and public policy, Theoretical Criminology, 2024 . T1City of Toronto, Toronto Community Crisis Service One-Year Outcome Evaluation Report, 2023 . T1Office of the Auditor General of Toronto, Review of Toronto Police Service: Opportunities to Support More Effective Responses to Calls for Service, 2022 . T1Toronto Police Service, 2025 Operating Budget and 2025 Chief's Annual Report

Candidate positions

Brad Bradford

Bradford has called for the deployment of police officers in every TTC subway station, supports the multi-year police hiring plan, and has proposed adding 50 sworn officers and 40 special constables to TTC hot spots, along with platform-edge doors and updated cleanliness standards. He has publicly supported Toronto Police Service budget increases each year of his council tenure and has framed the 2026 race around core services and a service review to identify cuts elsewhere.

T2CBC News, Bradford TTC police deployment proposal, 2023 . T2TorontoToday, Bradford 2026 mayoral platform coverage, 2026 . T2Beach Metro Community News, Bradford on core services, 2025

Olivia Chow

Chow launched the Toronto Community Crisis Service citywide on September 26, 2024, hiring more than 100 additional crisis workers and embedding TCCS teams 24/7 on Line 1 between Spadina and Bloor-Yonge stations as of November 15, 2025. She also supported the Toronto Police Service's $46.2 million budget increase for 2025 funding 109 net new officers, and added $5 million to SafeTO for summer youth programs.

T1City of Toronto, Toronto Community Crisis Service citywide launch, September 2024 . T2TTC News, TCCS embedded on Line 1, November 2025 . T2CBC News, Toronto Police Service 2025 budget increase, 2024 . T1City of Toronto, SafeTO summer youth programs $5 million top-up, 2025

Status quo. What Toronto already does.

Toronto's 2024 Crime Severity Index was 68.7, below the national figure of 77.89, with the Violent CSI at 99.8 (up roughly 3 percent year over year) and the Non-violent CSI at 56.8. Homicides totalled 84 in 2024 (up from 73 in 2023), and shooting events rose to 461 with 43 firearm-related deaths, but as of December 18, 2025 the city had recorded 39 homicides, a 55 percent decrease from the same point in 2024, on pace for the lowest annual total in roughly two decades. Auto thefts fell from 12,501 in 2023 to 9,570 in 2024 and dropped a further 25 to 34 percent through 2025. The 2025 Toronto Police Service operating budget was approved at roughly $1.22 billion, and the 2026 budget rose to a net $1.43 billion, including 143 net new officers in 2026 in addition to the officers hired in 2025.

T1Statistics Canada, Police-reported Crime Severity Index by CMA, 2024 . T1Toronto Police Service, 2024 Chief's Annual Report . T2Global News, Toronto homicide count December 2025 . T2TorontoToday, Auto theft drop reporting, 2025 . T2Equite Association, auto theft data, 2025 . T1Toronto Police Service Board, 2025 and 2026 operating budgets

Comparable jurisdictions

Eugene CAHOOTS1989 to 2023

Eugene's CAHOOTS program dispatches a non-uniformed pair (a crisis worker and a medic) to mental-health, homelessness, and addiction-related 911 calls in place of, or alongside, police. In 2021 CAHOOTS responded to 16,479 of 109,855 public-initiated calls to Eugene Police Department, roughly 15 percent of EPD call volume, on a 2022 contract value of approximately $820,586 against an EPD budget of about $68 million.

Outcome. Probability a 911 call resulted in an arrest fell by 76 percent in newly served areas; subsequent 911 call volume in those areas declined (Davis et al., NBER 33761, 2025).

Caveats. CAHOOTS operated in a city about one twentieth Toronto's population with different drug-poisoning, gun-violence, and policing baselines, and the contract relationship ended in spring 2023 in Eugene proper.

T3Davis, Norris, Schmitt, Shem-Tov, Strickland, Mobile Crisis Response Teams Support Better Policing: Evidence from CAHOOTS, NBER WP 33761, 2025 . T2White Bird Clinic and National League of Cities, CAHOOTS program data

Projections

The peer-reviewed and program-evaluation literature supports the following plural projections, applied with explicit caveats. The literature does not support a confident singular projection on whether a Bradford-style mix or a Chow-style mix produces lower aggregate violent-crime rates in Toronto over four years.

Time horizon

Police-hiring effects on serious-crime rates appear in years 1 to 3. Civilian crisis-response effects on arrest probability and ED throughput appear within months of program activation in served geographies. Public-health violence-reduction effects on the Glasgow scale require 5 to 15 years to accumulate and remain difficult to attribute to a single program.