Ottawa Homicide Project

Project Description:

The Ottawa Homicide Project is being conducted in partnership with Crime Prevention Ottawa (CPO) and the Ottawa Police Service (OPS). Essentially, we hope to uncover links between the geographical locations where homicides are taking place in our city and their proximity to various community-serving agencies – such as pharmacies, safe injection (also referred to as supervised consumption or supervised injection) sites and homeless shelters – and high-traffic social areas with a higher likelihood of patron intoxication – such as bars and liquor stores. In so doing, we are examining many different factors related to the context within which Ottawa homicides are occurring and have occurred over the past ten years (see Gallery Images for an example linking context and the five Ottawa geographic zones with the highest concentration of homicides).

This project has been conducted as a collaborative effort between the team lead (a student in the Victimology program), the Victimology Research Centre (VRC), and a team of students from the Bachelor of Public Safety (BPS) program. This group of students possess specialized knowledge and skills in creating interactive maps using geographic information systems (GIS) mapping technology. The GIS map our research team has created will add a visual element linking homicide locations to the various community destinations described above.

The VRC intends for this research to be ongoing. Our previously conducted research – including Ottawa homicide data spanning the years 2014-2020 and presented at 2020’s Victim and Survivors of Crime Week (VSCW) event – linked homicide concentrations with the postal codes in which they occurred. This earlier stage of the project was featured in the local media, including the CBC Ottawa series “All in a Day” and CTV Ottawa cable news.

The focus of this research team, however, has been expanded to include the years 2010-2020 with our data spanning an entire decade to give us a more comprehensive view of Ottawa homicide trends. With this continuation of the research, we hope to enlighten the public that it is not just postal codes that determine a neighbourhood’s risk of experiencing homicide. In the spirit of preventing the stigmatization of any given neighbourhood, we also wish to address the reality that sometimes, homicides are random occurrences with absolutely no connection to where they took place. That is, it is important to keep in mind that sometimes homicides are driven by relationships, not location.

In June, members of our research team will present a final report to the CPO board and community partners from the Byward Market Business Improvement Area (BIA) and Lowertown Community Association addressing outreach strategies for homicide prevention and present an ongoing database. What we wish to do is report the data to provide the community with a tool to use at their discretion in order to optimize their own safety in the spirit of prevention.

Contact the Team

Gallery