About Scout’s Crime Data

Crime Data FAQs

NeighborhoodScout Crime Risk Reports provide an instantobjective assessment of property and violent crime risks and rates for every U.S. address and neighborhood.  We offer seamless national coverage and up to 98% accuracy.

Discover the lowest crime neighborhoods in any city or townbefore you investlendunderwrite insurancesend employees to an unknown addressdeliver packagesor select a location for your business.

We also reveal which types of crime pose the greatest risks in any neighborhoodfrom theft to homicide. You’ll get the complete crime profile. Our exclusive crime data are developed for each neighborhood using our mathematical algorithms and crime statistics from more than 18,000 local law enforcement agencies.

Subscribers get instant access to look up crime risks for any location. Just enter an address or a neighborhood name. Easy access from any computer or mobile device.

What crime data is in a report?

NeighborhoodScout reveals the safety from crime for every neighborhood in Americaand shows you how each neighborhood compares to other neighborhoods nationwideso you can make informed decisions rapidly.

60+ crime statistics are part of our comprehensive neighborhood reports.

NeighborhoodScout® Crime Risk Ratings are on a nationally comparable 1-100 scale.  100 means safer than 100% of U.S. neighborhoods. 1 means safer than just 1% of U.S. neighborhoods.  We provide these risk ratings for: Total Crime RiskViolent Crime RiskProperty Crime RiskMurderRapeRobberyAssaultBurglaryTheftand Motor Vehicle Theft.

We also reveal a resident’s chances of becoming a victim in the locationthe total crime rateviolent crime rateand property crime rateas well as the crime density per square mile for the neighborhood.  All are compared to city and national averages for quick comparison.

We even show the crime trends from 5 years ago to todayand forecast crime risk 5 years into the future. For every neighborhood.

What makes NeighborhoodScout® Crime Data uniquely accurate?

Most city neighborhood crime data are incomplete and inaccurate because crimes are reported by individual law enforcement agenciesrather than by city or townand many cities – even small ones – have more than one agency responsible for law enforcement (municipaluniversitycountytransitetc.). Even FBI data are reported by agency not by city or townproviding an incomplete assessment of city-wide crime counts. It is an agency-centric rather than locality-centric reporting method. If you use FBI datayou only get city-wide general countsand only from one agency in the cityso it is generally incomplete for the city overallas well as not specific to a neighborhood or address.

There is commonly more variation in crime among neighborhoods in the same city then there is between cities.

Crime risk assessment across the nation is further hindered because the majority of law enforcement agencies in the United States do not geocode the specific locations of reported crimesmaking it difficult to ascertain the locationszip codes and neighborhoods where most crimes occur in America today. Even when we know locations for crimes the incidents have not been normalized based on resident and visitor population in the vicinity of an addressor are only from a single rather than all local agenciesso risks are often not accurately quantified.

Since in the U.S.crime reporting is agency-centric rather than location-centricNeighborhoodScout uses a relational database to associate crime incidences from all 18,000+ local law enforcement agencies in the U.S. to the specific local communities the agency coversand hence in which community the crimes have occurred.

Once we have these complete set of reported crime dataalong with millions of geocoded reported crime incidents using a GISwe begin our crime data development process.

The results are fine resolutionhighly accurate crime data that are comparable nationally.

Our approach provides you the ability to look at small areas effectively.

In some cases a city agency is in charge of law enforcementwhile in other areas it’s a county.  In many cases it is more than one agency for a geographic area. Since the geography variesit’s difficult to compare the scores among jurisdictionsor to get a true and complete picture of crime risk. This is why we use a relational database to assess the true count of reported crimes in a locality.

Although most agencies reportnot all do.  This creates holes in the data.  Our method allows us to accurately fill in the holes based on the crime experience of many like localesand provide accurate crime data for anywhere in the U.S.

Crime Types Defined

Property Crimes:

• Burglary : The unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or a theft.
• Larceny-Theft : The unlawful taking of property from the possession of another (excluding motor vehicles).
• Vehicle Theft : The theft or attempted theft of a motor vehicle.

Violent Endangerment / Violent Crimes:

• Homicide : The willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another.
• Rape : All forms of non-consensual sexual penetration.
• Armed Robbery : The taking or attempting to take anything of value from a person(s) by force or threat of violence.
• Aggravated Assault : An attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury.