Peterborough Police Service Create Online Visual Tool From Part of Crime Grant Proceeds

As part of the 2023-2026 Proceeds of Crime Grant from the Government of Ontario, the Peterborough Police Service has created an online visual tool to raise public awareness and understanding of police-reported hate and bias data.

Photo courtesy of the Peterborough Police Service.

The Anti-Hate Initiative has been a three-year grant project with several commitments, including training provided to sworn and civilian members of the Peterborough Police Service, creation of a dedicated webpage on the Peterborough Police Service website, learning about public perception of hate/bias through workshops and questions in the 2025 Community Perception Survey and it concluded with a city-wide public education and awareness campaign between January and March.

The online visual tool is an exploration of police-reported hate/bias crimes and incidents between 2021 and 2025. It is designed to highlight the data and what we can learn from it.  

The tool is broken down into the following sections:

• About the Map

• Is it a Hate Crime or Hate Incident?

• About the Data

• What happens when an incident is reported to police?

• What’s been happening?

• Geographic trends over time

• Breaking down the data

• How often charges are laid

• 2025 Community Perception Survey

• What do I do if I am a victim of, or witness to, a  Hate Crime or Hate Incident?

• How to report a crime

“I believe sharing this police-reported data with the public is important to understanding what is happening in our community,” Stuart Betts, Peterborough Police Chief. “As a Police Service we know that incidents involving hate/bias are often underreported. I hope that if the public is aware of how the justice system can address hate crime/hate bias and that reporting such incidents is important, more people will feel comfortable coming forward.” 

The tool can also be found through the Hate Has No Place Here Public Education and Awareness Campaign webpage.

A story map is an online visual tool that tells a story as you scroll through its sections. The Peterborough Police chose to make the story map a page-one journey that viewers scroll through, rather than a series of pages that take viewers away from the main page through a series of ‘clicks.’

The information is breaking down the data of police-reported hate/bias incidents and crime over a five-year period.

This is a dataset of incidents reported to the Peterborough Police Service within a specific time frame. The data is representative of the years 2021-2025. The Peterborough Police Service is aware that these types of incidents are underreported, citing that they cannot take the data if incidents are not reported.

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