Residents of Toronto experiencing a mental health emergency can turn to the Toronto Community Crisis Service for support.
And when the emergency service needed help visualizing dispatch data, it turned to students at Northeastern University’s Toronto campus.
“The idea was to see how the Toronto Community Crisis Service (TCCS) can utilize existing dispatch data to visualize trends that would aid in our service delivery,” says Andrea Morales, a policy development officer in the city’s Police Reform Unit, which runs the TCCS. Morales was the city’s lead on the project.
“It’s a relatively new service,” Morales continues. “So, having a bit of a newer perspective into our data evaluation was really interesting for us on our end.”
The TCCS is a non-police led mental-health response that provides free, confidential, in-person mental health support to Torontonians ages 16 and over. It started in March 2022 and went citywide in July 2024. Along with fire, EMS and police, it is the city’s fourth emergency service.
It also has “a lot of data” it has collected to monitor its progress, says Nicole Watson, who served as manager of the Police Reform Unit at the time of the project.
That sounded great to John Wilder, assistant teaching professor in analytics on Northeastern’s Toronto campus.
“In my classes, I often use Toronto’s open data portal because that gives students access to real-world data instead of just classroom examples and — because it’s Toronto and many of them are new to Toronto — it sort of helps them learn a little bit about the city,” Wilder says.
So, students in Wilder’s Communication and Visualization with Data class were given anonymized dispatch data that the service has collected and asked to analyze and present their findings.
The students found calls followed certain seasonal trends and increased at certain times of day, which has the potential for supporting staffing and resource allocation.
Students said the experience was valuable for several reasons.
Manav Gupta explains that a major difference between real-world datasets and those typically available for academic exercises is that real-world ones include raw data — data may not always be reported in a standard format, for instance, or may include misspellings or may be categorized incorrectly.
“There is a lot of information that can’t be automated and requires some manual intervention — that means the possibility of mistakes,” says Gupta, who is earning his master’s of professional studies degree in analytics.
For instance, the TCCS dataset included the start and end times of calls received but, in some cases, these values were reversed. This error was then compounded when the students tried to calculate average call durations.
“This is going to completely change my data description or my analysis, so it’s really important to remove all of these,” Gupta says.
Wilder says that such experience is necessary in the world outside the classroom.
“A lot of our students’ time after they graduate and are in the workforce will be cleaning data or preparing data, and combining data in different ways,” Wilder says. “Working with (raw) data is going to be a big portion of what they’re actually doing, and I wanted them to get experience with that.”
But working with raw data is not the only thing that future data analysts need to do.
“I had learned technical skills, but I had never got the chance to present it somewhere,” says Rahitya Velpuri, who is also earning her master’s of professional studies degree in analytics. “So this project was good because it gave me the platform to present.”
Their clients were impressed.
“It demonstrated the value of harnessing or utilizing some of these innovative partnerships with post-secondary institutions that allow for both students to be able to obtain their course credit and also help us to maybe produce additional materials or to add a different perspective to the work that we’re doing,” Watson says.
And it’s not just the students and the TCCS that can benefit from such a collaboration, but potentially the entire city of Toronto.
“We really have a keen interest in making and being accountable to the public,” Watson continues. “Having the students take a look at how to take the data and create accessible forms of visualization and understanding for the general public is something that’s very important to us and something we’re committed to.”