About SooLedger

Why this exists

Ask ten people in the Soo how downtown is doing and you get ten answers, most of them from a headline or a Facebook post. Council hears the same split every time a safety item comes up. The police release things one at a time; the Board reports totals once a month; court outcomes land months later, if they land anywhere. Nobody was keeping it in one place, by block, over time.

SooLedger keeps that record. It does not tell anyone the city is safe or unsafe, and it does not promise to change anything by itself. What it does is give residents, business owners, councillors and the Police Services Board the same numbers, cited to the source, so a delegation at council, a Board question, a BIA budget or a landlord’s decision about lighting and cameras can point at something checkable instead of a feeling. Business reports fill the gap the releases leave: what happens at the door and never gets called in.

What it is

SooLedger, by Community Ledger, is a public record of public safety and disorder incidents in Sault Ste. Marie: what police made public, whether anyone was arrested or charged, what the outcome was, and what council did about it. Everything here is built from public records — police media releases and archived copies, SIU releases, official statistics, council documents, and reports from businesses and residents about their own premises — normalized into one auditable dataset.

No names, no faces, no exact addresses. Locations are hundred-blocks. Every published number links back to the source it came from, and a link to a release is a link to the source's own publication. A charge is an allegation until a court decides it.

No person reviews records before they publish. Deterministic rules publish or discard each one: a record the model scored below 0.5 confidence is discarded (that is what "held back" means on this site); a record that trips a privacy check publishes without its free-text location detail; an unmatched street publishes without a block; an implausible date falls back to the publication date. The methodology lists the rules and the quality page shows what they did.

Corrections

If a record is wrong or identifies someone, email hello@communityledger.ca with the record's link. The operator removes the record while it is checked, the removal is logged, and licensees who receive our data are notified through the corrections feed. Names are never published, so a correction is about the record's facts, not about a person.

Run by Community Ledger, in Sault Ste. Marie. Questions: hello@communityledger.ca.

Taking it to council

Every block and zone page has a "Bring this to council" button. It opens a one-page kit laid out to print: the numbers for the window, the last five incidents with their sources, the business and partner totals behind the privacy threshold, the local context notes, the capture-rate caveat, how to cite the page, and a blank box for what you are asking for. City Council and the Police Services Board both hear public delegations; how to present explains the steps and points to the city's own delegation form.