What is the Local News Data Hub?
The Local News Data Hub’s goals are to i) shore up local journalism across Canada by supplying newsrooms with data-informed stories ii) train early-career data journalists and iii) collaborate with individual journalists and news organizations on local data journalism stories and projects.
The Data Hub’s reporting team consists of data journalists and data analysts who are either students or recent graduates. Working collaboratively with faculty at Toronto Metropolitan University, the team identifies government and other data with the potential to generate local stories for more than one community. Once a dataset has been analyzed and stories are identified, reporters chase interviews and other research and then write data-informed local stories. In most cases this involves producing one or more story templates that are then customized with data/content for specific communities. The local stories are posted on the LNDH website where they are available at no cost to any local news organization. Stories are also shared with the Canadian Press wire service for distribution to CP clients across the country. Find out more about the Local News Data Hub here.
Introduction and background
Our goal with this project was to produce national and local stories identifying the municipalities in Canada with the highest and lowest concentrations of women who are sworn officers in local police services. Sworn officers include frontline uniformed and senior officers but not administrative/civilian employees.
We used the results of the annual Police Administration Survey for this analysis, which is based on data self-reported by police services going back to 2000. The results for 2023 were published on March 26, 2024.
To ensure data were not skewed by small changes, we focused on police services with at least 100 officers in 2023. This resulted in a final ranking of 75 local police departments. We focused on the number of women and men who were sworn officers in each police service and then calculated the proportion of women for each service in 2023 (the most recent year available) and in 2008. We selected 2008 as the comparison year because it allowed us to look for trends over a 15-year period and also because pre-2008 data was less complete and therefore less comparable to 2023.
The 30×30 Initiative, which includes Canadian and American police agencies and researchers supporting the advancement of women in policing, suggests a group must make up at least 30 per cent of an organization before it can influence its culture. We therefore used that threshold as the standard against which to measure the performance of all of 75 police services.
The results of our analysis show women made up 30 per cent or more of sworn officers in six of the 75 services. In three additional cases they comprised between 29.6 per cent and 29.9 per cent of the sworn ranks. In those cases, we rounded up the numbers to arrive at a total of nine police services that met the 30 per cent threshold that the 30×30 Initiative suggests is necessary to produce cultural change.
The series includes a national story and three regional stories about the police services in the British Columbia, Ontario and the Prairie provinces.
Dissemination
The national and regional stories were distributed to subscribers of the Canadian Press wire service. The Local News Data Hub also produced customized templates for Ontario cities and towns where there are community newspapers owned by the Metroland Media Group and Village Media. The template for each community included opening paragraphs describing the percentage of sworn officers who are women in the local police service along with information on where the service appeared in the ranking. It also included background paragraphs discussing recruitment and retention challenges and the added value women officers bring to local policing. Each publication was then left to add quotes from local officials and other relevant local information as deemed necessary.
Definitions
Gender: Whether a person identifies as a man, woman or non-binary person in the Police Administration Survey. Statistics Canada does not publish information on the number of non-binary or transgender police officers because, although the survey gathers this data, the small number of officers involved creates privacy concerns. Statistics Canada therefore randomly assigns either a 0 or 1 corresponding to man or woman.
Police jurisdiction: The geographical area in which policing is provided by a police service. This often, but not always, corresponds with municipal boundaries.
Sworn officers: Police officers including front-line uniformed officers as well as investigators but not administrative/civilian employees, per the Statistics Canada Police Administration Survey questionnaire.
The data source
The stories in this project are based on Statistics Canada Table 35-10-0077-01, which includes gender data for municipal police services collected as part of the annual Police Administration Survey. The most recent data for 2023 were published on March 26, 2024. Data from the survey go back to 2000 and are reported by police services on May 15 of each year.
According to Statistics Canada, the purpose of the survey is to collect statistics on public policing personnel and expenditures from municipal, provincial and federal police services across the country. We did not include expenditure data in our analysis because the experts we consulted said variations in the way police services report this information would make it difficult to accurately compare across jurisdictions.
We were advised, however, that personnel data is comparable. We shared our data and methodology with Brianna Jaffray from the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics at Statistics Canada who confirmed that our approach comparing annual Police Administration Survey personnel data across jurisdictions and over time was valid.
Services self report the number of police officers, civilians, special constables and recruits employed by the police service (in full-time equivalents). Information on hirings, departures, long-term leave and eligibility to retire is provided, as well as Indigenous and visible minority identity of employees. The data about visible minorities in police services were incomplete, however, because many services did not report statistics for all officers, so we chose not to focus on this variable.
Analyzing the data
The Statistics Canada police staffing data for all local police services were analyzed using a combination of Python and Microsoft Excel. The Local News Data Hub team focused on the number and percentage of women in police services in 2008 and 2023 for this analysis.
We downloaded data from the Statistics Canada website and then isolated the specific variables and years we decided to focus on. Specifically, we included geography, year, total number of officers, number of women officers and number of men officers.
The total number of officers variable was used to filter the data and remove all police services with fewer than 100 total police officers. Only the remaining 75 police services with 100 or more officers were included in this analysis.
We added additional columns for the percentage of women and men officers in each service and then used the total number of officers and number of women officers data to calculate these percentages. The data were then sorted by percentage of women officers and the police services were ranked based on their performance in this category.
St. John’s, N.L. originally ranked the highest, having reported approximately 60 per cent women officers in the local police service. Upon contacting the service, we learned this was a reporting error, and the number was corrected to 32 per cent.
Key findings
Across Canada there were 75 municipalities with police services that had 100 or more officers in 2023.
After rounding up numbers greater than 29.5, nine police services had 30 per cent or more women officers.
