Terms of use
Effective September 10, 2026. Plain language; the headings are part of the terms.
What this site is
SooLedger, published by Community Ledger, is a public record of public safety and disorder incidents, arrests, charges, court outcomes and council decisions in Sault Ste. Marie, assembled from public sources. It is published for information. It is not legal advice, not a police service, and not an emergency service. If someone is in danger, call 911.
Where the information comes from
Records are built from public documents: Sault Ste. Marie Police Service media releases (including archived copies from the Internet Archive), Police Services Board statistical reports, City of Sault Ste. Marie council agendas and minutes, Special Investigations Unit releases, Ontario Court of Justice statistics, Statistics Canada tables, and reports that businesses and residents send us about their own premises. We read those documents and record facts from them. For council items we publish the item's title and a short paraphrase of what was decided; for everything else the record is structured fields, not the source's text. Every record links to the document it came from; a link to a release is a link to the source's own publication.
We keep a full private snapshot of every source document as it was when we read it. Snapshots are never published; they exist so that any record can be traced back to its source and so that a correction or takedown can be verified. Statistics Canada data is used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Statistics Canada is not responsible for how we use it. Police, court and council documents, and the private snapshots, are used as public records under fair dealing for research and news reporting. If you hold rights in a source document and object to our use of it, write to us and we will respond within ten business days.
Accuracy, and what the numbers mean
A record here means a public source reported the incident, not that a court found anyone guilty. A charge is an allegation until a court decides it. Locations are hundred-blocks, never addresses. Counts are lower than the police service's own totals because we count only incidents that appear in a public release; the official statistics page shows the totals we calibrate against and the methodology explains the gap. Court outcomes take months to appear.
No person reviews records before publication. Deterministic rules decide: a record the model scored below 0.5 confidence, or from a source not cleared for publication, is discarded and counted as "held back"; a record that trips a privacy check publishes without its free-text location detail; a record whose street cannot be matched publishes without a block; a record with an implausible date publishes with the source's publication date instead. The quality page shows what the rules did.
We work to keep records accurate and will correct or remove a record that is wrong. We cannot promise the site is complete, current at every moment, or free of errors, and we are not liable for decisions made on the basis of it.
Corrections and takedowns
If you believe a record identifies you, your business or another person, or is wrong, email hello@communityledger.ca with the page link. The operator removes the record while it is checked, the removal is written to an audit log, and licensees who receive data from us are told through the corrections feed they must apply. We answer within ten business days.
Using the data
You may read, quote and link to this site freely. The public API and the monthly CSV export may be reused with attribution to SooLedger and the original source named in each record. Automated access should respect rate limits and the robots file.
You may not use anything from this site to identify a person, to make decisions about an individual (tenancy, employment, credit, insurance of a person), to harass or target anyone, or to present our records as findings of a court. Licensed data access is governed by a separate written agreement that limits use to commercial-property underwriting, loss prevention, site selection and research.
Business and resident reports
Businesses and residents that report incidents confirm that they are reporting about their own premises and that what they submit is true to the best of their knowledge. A report is recorded in the contributor's private log as soon as it is submitted, subject to automated guards (a confirmed email address, a plausible date, and at most ten reports in thirty days); no person reviews it. Public counts, costs and measures from businesses or partners appear only once three distinct contributors exist on a block or zone, as described in the privacy policy. A reporter can delete everything they have given us at any time. A report may also be sent as a few words by email from the registered address, or typed into the quick box on the report page; a model reads those words to fill in the same fields, and the reporter is sent (or shown) exactly what was recorded, with a one-tap way to correct it.
What you give and what you keep
Businesses and residents who report are contributors, not customers: the tool is free for them and paid for by the institutions and licensees that buy block-level figures. A first report accepts these terms (version contributor-terms-2026-09-10), and the acceptance is recorded with its time and version.
You keep
- Ownership of every entry you make: the report, its description, its photos and your security-measures checklist.
- The right to export your entries at any time, and to correct or delete any of them; a deleted entry stops counting at once.
- Your identity: your name, business name, address, email, file numbers, descriptions and photos are never published, shared or sold, and never leave the private layer in any product, public or licensed.
You give
- A licence to Community Ledger, perpetual and non-exclusive, to publish and to license aggregate figures built from your entries, at the hundred-block level, never below three contributors, and never in a form that identifies you, your business or your premises.
- The right to keep your entries in its private records for provenance (so a published figure can be traced to the entries behind it) until you delete them.
Changes and law
We may change these terms; the effective date above tells you when. These terms are governed by the laws of Ontario and Canada. Questions: hello@communityledger.ca.