Visualizing Mental Health Act Apprehensions in Toronto

The number of arrests made using civil mental health law increases
Author

Simon Wallace

Published

October 21, 2022

The City of Toronto recently a dataset of civil Mental Health Act apprehensions. In this notebook I show how to use Python to visualize and analyze the data. The Toronto Police Service has also published its own visualizations. This is a teaching notebook — my goal is to demonstrate one way computational tools can be used for quick and effective analyses of data.

If the code looks daunting, don’t worry! There are lots of great learning resources out there. If you’re entirely new to Python, start here. If you’re ready to start doing data anlaysis, poke around the official Pandas tutorials.

For this project, we will use pandas to organize the data and seaborn to create the visualizations. I will set out all of my code and methodology. First, let’s import the libraries and load the dataset.

Import the libraries and the dataset

import pandas as pd
import seaborn.objects as so
df = pd.read_json('https://ckan0.cf.opendata.inter.prod-toronto.ca/dataset/mental-health-apprehensions/resource/4be57d43-830d-4316-90ac-3b09f31b4e6f/download/mental-health-apprehensions.json')

df.drop('_id', axis=1, inplace=True)

Get summary information

We can get summary information using the ‘describe’ method:

df.describe(include='all')
EventUniqueID ReportDate ReportYear ReportMonth ReportDayofWeek ReportHour OccurrenceDate OccurrenceYear OccurrenceMonth OccurrenceDayofWeek OccurrenceHour ApprehensionType Division HoodID NeighbourhoodName PremisesType Sex AgeGroup
count 87907 87907 87907.000000 87907 87907 84849.000000 87907 87907.000000 87907 87907 84608.000000 87907 87907 87907 87907 87907 87907 87907
unique 87678 3103 NaN 12 7 NaN 3116 NaN 12 7 NaN 5 18 141 141 7 3 7
top GO-2019798628 2022-06-01T04:00:00 NaN May Thursday NaN 2022-06-01T04:00:00 NaN May Thursday NaN Mha Sec 17 (Power Of App) D14 75 Church-Yonge Corridor (75) Apartment Male 25 to 34
freq 3 59 NaN 8239 13655 NaN 59 NaN 8248 13638 NaN 69170 9675 3214 3214 35475 50135 24861
mean NaN NaN 2018.214772 NaN NaN 13.750474 NaN 2018.213191 NaN NaN 13.680373 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
std NaN NaN 2.426461 NaN NaN 5.902043 NaN 2.427254 NaN NaN 5.789953 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
min NaN NaN 2014.000000 NaN NaN 1.000000 NaN 2002.000000 NaN NaN 1.000000 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
25% NaN NaN 2016.000000 NaN NaN 10.000000 NaN 2016.000000 NaN NaN 10.000000 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
50% NaN NaN 2018.000000 NaN NaN 14.000000 NaN 2018.000000 NaN NaN 14.000000 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
75% NaN NaN 2020.000000 NaN NaN 18.000000 NaN 2020.000000 NaN NaN 18.000000 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
max NaN NaN 2022.000000 NaN NaN 23.000000 NaN 2022.000000 NaN NaN 23.000000 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN

There’s a lot here that is immediately interesting. A few observations:

  • There have been a lot of Mental Health Act apprehensions in Toronto. This dataset reports 87,907 arrests between 2014 and 2022.
  • Apprehsnions are a mid-day phenomena, with most detentions six hours before or after 1PM.
  • The top month for apprehensions is May, and the top day of the week for arrests is Thursday.
  • More men were arrested than women, and the top age demographic for arrests is 25-34.

We can visualize some other trends.

Year over year increases

We can chart the change year over year and parse out reports regarding the person’s gender.

gender_year = df.groupby('ReportYear')['Sex'].value_counts().to_frame().rename(columns={'Sex':'Total'})
so.Plot(gender_year, x='ReportYear', y='Total', color='Sex').add(so.Line())

Between 2014 and 2021 Mental Health Act arrests almost doubled. It also looks like that rate of increase is slightly higher for men over women, but we will have to look a bit closer to be sure. It also looks like there was a marked uptick of arrests in 2021. Perhaps this is related to the pandemic?

Why the steep drop off in 2022? The year is not over yet!

Age group differences

We can look at different age categories:

age_year = df.groupby('ReportYear')['AgeGroup'].value_counts().to_frame().rename(columns={'AgeGroup':'Total'})
so.Plot(age_year, x='ReportYear', y='Total', color='AgeGroup').add(so.Line())

The 25-34 age group is far and away the largest plurality of cases.

filt = df['ReportYear'] == 2021
df[filt]['AgeGroup'].value_counts(normalize=True)
25 to 34        0.302505
35 to 44        0.203738
18 to 24        0.183327
45 to 54        0.122542
55 to 64        0.104000
65+             0.074841
Not Recorded    0.009047
Name: AgeGroup, dtype: float64

Location of arrest

People can get arrested in all sorts of places. Let’s see where individuals are apprehended:

prem_year = df.groupby('ReportYear')['PremisesType'].value_counts().to_frame().rename(columns={'PremisesType':'Total'})
so.Plot(prem_year, x='ReportYear', y='Total', color='PremisesType').add(so.Line())

This is a surprising and interesting visualization because I did not expect apartments — peoples’ homes — to be the main site of arrest. This implies that people are being arrested after they or someone in their household calls for help.

Time of year, day of week, and time of day

Different months:

month = df['OccurrenceMonth'].value_counts(normalize=False).to_frame()
month = month.reindex(["January", "February", "March", 'April', 'May','June','July','August','September','October','November','December'])
so.Plot(month, x=month.index, y='OccurrenceMonth').add(so.Line())

This shows that March, April, May, and June are the biggest months for arrests.

Different days:

day_week = df['OccurrenceDayofWeek'].value_counts().to_frame()
day_week = day_week.reindex(['Monday    ', 'Tuesday   ','Wednesday ','Thursday  ','Friday    ','Saturday  ','Sunday    '])
so.Plot(day_week,x=day_week.index,y='OccurrenceDayofWeek').add(so.Line())

There’s a huge drop off in arrests on the weekend.