About Scout’s Crime Data
NeighborhoodScout Crime Risk Reports provide an instant, objective 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 town, before you invest, lend, underwrite insurance, send employees to an unknown address, deliver packages, or select a location for your business.
We also reveal which types of crime pose the greatest risks in any neighborhood, from 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 America, and shows you how each neighborhood compares to other neighborhoods nationwide, so 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 Risk, Violent Crime Risk, Property Crime Risk, Murder, Rape, Robbery, Assault, Burglary, Theft, and Motor Vehicle Theft.
We also reveal a resident’s chances of becoming a victim in the location, the total crime rate, violent crime rate, and property crime rate, as 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 today, and 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 agencies, rather than by city or town, and many cities – even small ones – have more than one agency responsible for law enforcement (municipal, university, county, transit, etc.). Even FBI data are reported by agency not by city or town, providing an incomplete assessment of city-wide crime counts. It is an agency-centric rather than locality-centric reporting method. If you use FBI data, you only get city-wide general counts, and only from one agency in the city, so it is generally incomplete for the city overall, as 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 crimes, making it difficult to ascertain the locations, zip 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 address, or are only from a single rather than all local agencies, so risks are often not accurately quantified.
Since in the U.S., crime reporting is agency-centric rather than location-centric, NeighborhoodScout 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 covers, and hence in which community the crimes have occurred.
Once we have these complete set of reported crime data, along with millions of geocoded reported crime incidents using a GIS, we begin our crime data development process.
The results are fine resolution, highly 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 enforcement, while in other areas it’s a county. In many cases it is more than one agency for a geographic area. Since the geography varies, it’s difficult to compare the scores among jurisdictions, or 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 report, not 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 locales, and 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.