“Safety,” however, is a broad term and qualitative interviews helped to unpack its differing meaning to residents. Interviews revealed two major ways residents understood it: safety in regards to violence and crime (gun violence in particular) and safety in the sense of pedestrian safety around roads. Interestingly, we saw major regional differences in the relative emphasis of how interviewees understood safety. Concerns about violent crime, and particularly gun violence, were raised by 60% of West End interviewees (gun violence specifically in 50%), whereas these concerns only came up in 30% of East End interviews. While a handful of respondents spoke about domestic violence and multiple respondents, mostly female, spoke about general feelings of safety walking home, gun violence and gang-related crime predominated in discussions on threats of violent crime. West End residents also spoke repeatedly about how their communities were unfairly associated with crime and labelled as unsafe, creating a negative stigma towards the community. As we will explore later, some residents saw this stigma as driving a lack of government attention or support for their neighbourhoods. On the other hand, multiple East End residents reported seeing improvements with regards to crime in their neighbourhoods. Interestingly when one looks at outside data, it appears that pedestrian fatalities are indeed higher in East end neighbourhoods, mirroring the regional differences shared by the residents we interviewed.² But in regards to violent crime, rates are actually comparable between the two neighbourhoods,³ demonstrating perceptions of safety are not simply driven by the actual number of reported crimes, but other factors which may include media coverage or the public nature of incidents.