Ethics
Documenting violence carries its own risks. These are the commitments the Observatory works under.
Draft — awaiting sign-off
These commitments are drawn from the project’s guideline document and from how the site is actually built. CRRIC should review and adopt them formally before launch.
Do no harm
A record of an incident must not become a second harm to the people in it. Private individuals are not named — neither those harmed nor those accused. Locations are given as a municipality, never an address. Images of victims are not published.
Evidence before assertion
Nothing is presented as more certain than the evidence supports. Every record carries one of eight evidence levels, shown wherever the record appears, and Unable to Verify never means an incident did not happen — only that the available evidence does not meet the threshold. The levels are set out on the verification page.
What happened is kept apart from why
The description of an incident is recorded separately from any account of its motive, and a motive is marked established, alleged or undetermined. A motive is never inferred from the identity of those involved, from the neighbourhood, or from the nature of the act alone. Where a source carries no motive — as police open-data feeds generally do not — none is claimed.
No community is a suspect
The Observatory records incidents, not populations. Figures are never presented in a way that attributes violence to an ethnic, religious or national group, and counts are not published at a granularity that would effectively identify a small community.
Counts are not comparable by default
A rise in recorded incidents can mean more violence, better reporting, or a new source being monitored. The site says which sources it holds and over what period, so a reader can tell the difference. Police-recorded offence counts and documented individual events are reported as separate figures and are never added together.
Correction over defence
When a record is shown to be wrong it is corrected, marked disputed, or withdrawn, and the source link is kept so any record can be checked against its origin. Requests go through the contact page.
Independence
The Observatory is an initiative of the Conflict and Resilience Research Institute Canada (CRRIC). It documents incidents regardless of who the parties are, and does not adjust the record to suit any government, funder or community organisation.