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Crimes and fires in the area on the map
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Viewing a specific crime
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Reporting an incident
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We <3 HTV
Inspiration
Safety is a growing concern in Toronto and an important topic among the 2026 mayoral election. We wanted to build a tool to keep the citizens of Toronto in the know of crimes and fires happening around them, so that they can be aware, stay safe, and make any updates to their plans or commutes.
We also took inspiration from Waze and how Google utilizes driver data to make informed decisions. We wanted to model Insight Toronto around being able to gather data as a lot of crime also goes unreported, and then be able to turn those into statistics that can be acted upon.
What it does
Insight Toronto is an app that allows users to view and report any crime or fire that is currently ongoing within the city of Toronto, helping citizens to stay alert.
Additionally it scrapes active calls from Toronto Police Services (TPS) and Toronto Fire Services (TFS) and populates the Insight map, keeping our data up to date with the latest reported and unreported incidents.
How we built it
We built the app using React Native and Expo Go to be able to easily view a demo of the app on our phones, and allowing both IOS and Android users to use our app without having to maintain two codebases.
On the backend we use AWS Lambda to keep it serverless while maintaining scalability.
For the database we used Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.
We scan publicly available online data from TPS and TFS for live incident feeds and populate our database with those official reported incidents.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into many challenges ranging from both technical, non-technically, frustrating, and fun challenges during this hackathon.
It had been a while since the both of us had attended a hackthon, so we had struggled to come up with an idea for a while. We didn't want to build just another simple GPT wrapper and resonated with the HTV X School of Cities mission to build something that would support the city that we grew up in.
It had been a while since we've created a react native app, so we had a few outdated packages that we spent a while updating and debugging. Both of us haven't worked with the AWS ecosystem before, and wanted to use this hackathon as a learning opportunity, so we ran into some difficulties setting that up and deciding on system design, how to gather data, and making it usable.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
In the end we were able to successfully design an app from start to finish that allows users to be able to view and report any crimes and fires within the city of Toronto, for other citizens to see, helping users stay informed and safe.
What we learned
We learned a lot about mobile app design and choices, such as why Reactive Native might be better or worse than Swift.
Most importantly, we learned a lot about the Amazon ecosystem and tools that is commonly used in the workforce, such as Lambda and Aurora RDS.
What's next for Insight Toronto
Next for Insight Toronto, would be to expand our profile and reporting system to include a hidden reputation system to prevent misuse, misreporting, and trolling.
Additionally we would gather this information and parter up with law enforcement or government bodies to supply this data as a lot of crimes do often go unreported, and could be a source of reliable peer-to-peer verified information.
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