Even Online, Crime Stats Are Limited
Some cities in Minnesota classify snowmobiles as motor vehicles. So when someone takes a snowmobile for a joy ride across the state’s frozen landscape, the burglary is listed in the police report as a motor-vehicle theft.
Police jurisdictions in warmer climes don’t consider snowmobiles in the same category as Land Cruisers and Volkswagen Beetles, throwing crime statistics for these Minnesota cities out of sync with other areas in the country.
This is just one example of why it’s tough for home buyers to make apples-to-apples comparisons of crime statistics. That’s if they can even get them. It’s difficult for consumers to obtain up-to-date crime statistics for individual neighborhoods.
Many police agencies refuse to release these figures. Realtors are uneasy discussing crime in their territories because of decades-old “steering laws,” which prohibit real estate agents from showing potential buyers properties based on their race.
Realtors are concerned that clients may misunderstand why they’re discussing crime, said June Barlow, vice president and general counsel for the California Assn. of Realtors.
“People may think that the intent in giving them crime stats is subterfuge to keep them away from an area,” Barlow said, adding that to avoid miscommunication, agents often refer clients to a local police department for more information.
Even crime statistics online are limited, but with some research and resourcefulness, consumers can ferret out stats for certain areas.
Most police departments report crime statistics to state and federal criminal justice agencies. California’s 58 sheriffs’ departments and 380 police departments report their numbers on a monthly basis to the state’s Justice Department. Figures for the state’s 58 counties are available at https://www.caag.state.ca.us/cjsc/datatabs.htm.
The state, in turn, reports its numbers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which releases crime information in its Uniform Crime Reports or UCRs. Much of this information is now available online at https://www.fbi.gov/ucr.htm.
The annual UCR report, “Crime in the U.S.,” is released in October with statistics for the previous year and includes figures for cities with 10,000 and more residents.
Numbers Too Broad to Be Useful
But both state and national numbers are too broad for a consumer to determine how safe an individual neighborhood is. And it’s important for consumers to research the demographics of a particular area to interpret crime statistics for that region properly.
“The city of Vernon has 100 residences and 1,000 warehouses,” said Michael Van Winkle, an information officer for the California Department of Justice. “The warehouses report crime all the time, so per capita, Vernon looks really bad on the crime scene.”
Another example is Culver City, which has “high crime” because of the Fox Hills Mall, which draws thousands of outsiders to the area each day, Van Winkle said.
Some California police agencies post crime statistics online. The Los Angeles Police Department offers numbers for its 18 divisions in its “1999 Statistical Digest,” at https://www.lapdonline.org. Again, these numbers are quite broad and cover numerous neighborhoods.
The LAPD says it was receiving so many requests from consumers, both by phone and mail, for crime statistics on local neighborhoods that it quit taking these requests and now refers residents to the Los Angeles Public Library and its branches.
Home buyers can obtain statistics for “reporting districts”--smaller areas that are typically a few blocks wide--by asking for the LAPD’s “Quarterly Report of Selected Crimes and Attempts by Reporting District” at their local library, said Officer Eduardo Funes, an LAPD spokesman.
Several police departments in California post color-coded crime maps on the Web. The Riverside Police Department posts maps for its five divisions on its Web site at https://www.ci.riverside.ca.us/rpd/mainpage.htm. These are not current, however, with the last numbers posted for September 1999.
San Diego’s police department lists up-to-date, monthly crime stats by neighborhood--a rare find--on its Web site at https://www.sannet.gov/police/crime-facts/crimanal.shtml. It also offers crime maps for these neighborhoods.
But criminologists caution that color-coded crime maps can be deceiving.
“These maps don’t show specifically where crimes took place,” said Michael D. Maltz, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Maltz, who studies how state and federal lawmakers collect and crunch crime statistics and the gaps that often exist in these numbers, suggests consumers consider the following caveats when viewing crime maps online:
* If one area is larger than another, it may have more crimes but be just as safe.
* If one area has a higher housing density, it may have more crimes but be just as safe.
* If one area has more commercial establishments, it may have more crimes but be just as safe.
Consequently, Maltz suggests that home buyers drive through areas they’re interested in and see for themselves.
Several real estate Web sites are attempting to further localize crime statistics, either by developing proprietary computer systems to crunch crime data themselves, or by purchasing it from research groups that sell crime data to businesses.
Scottsdale, Ariz.,-based HomeFair.com, a subsidiary of Homestore.com, collects crime statistics used in its “Relocation Crime Lab” calculator from three sources including the FBI’s UCR reports, state governments and 8,000 police departments across the country.
“We often use local level information to supplement or correct information gained at the FBI or state level,” said Bryan Schutjer, vice president of HomeFair.com.
Schutjer said HomeFair’s proprietary system relies on multiple sources to make its data timely. The FBI’s UCRs are usually 10 months behind, and state data is typically published with a 10-month delay.
HomeFair’s Relocation Crime Lab allows users to compare crime in one city with crime in another for 6,251 cities using a crime index that weights violent crime higher than nonviolent crime.
For example, Denver, Colo., has a Relocation Crime Lab index of 141, a somewhat higher crime rate than the national average of 100, compared with an index of 191 for Los Angeles, also a somewhat higher rate. A search comparing Denver with Los Angeles also returns a graph that compares annual crime rates per 100,000 for both cities of robbery, rape, homicide, aggravated assaults and motor-vehicle thefts.
Lenders use crime statistics compiled by Exton, Pa.-based CAP Index, a research firm that combines social characteristics of an area such as population, housing, education and income data with known indicators of crime to come up with a site’s overall risk of crime.
The company says this method helps consumers understand the crime potential of individual neighborhoods compared with national, state and county averages.
Since there isn’t neighborhood-specific crime data to be had for most areas of the country, the company created these numbers by devising a computer system that could model crime statistics for an area based on crimes reported there in the past.
CAP Index says consumers can order more detailed information on neighborhoods that they’re interested in for $50 to $90 a site at https://www.capindex.com. Microsoft’s online real-estate offering, HomeAdvisor, also uses CapIndex’s numbers on its site.
CAP Index, which primarily sells its data to businesses, plans to make its crime reports available to consumers this spring at a discounted rate of $10 to $20 a site, said Robert Figlio, the company’s chief executive.
Many Are Using Crime Software
Lenders aren’t the only ones using crime software. About 10% of the nation’s real estate agents use iPlace’s eNeighborhoods software, which includes crime statistics, said Jeff Paradise, vice president of product development for iPlace. IPlace collects crime information from police jurisdictions nationwide and analyzes it.
Consumers can access the company’s crime indexes at https://www.iplace.com. On its site, the company divides the total number of crimes committed in an area by the population of that area to arrive at an index that shows the chance of being a victim of a crime.
It also divides the number of murders, rapes, burglaries and assaults in an area by its population to devise the chance of being the victim of a bodily crime.
The overall crime index for an area on iPlace is arrived at by comparing the score for that area against every other jurisdiction in the nation, Paradise said. The higher the overall index is, the safer the area is, he added.
IPlace’s data is also limited. Even though the search engine allows users to input specific addresses, entering a ZIP Code anywhere in the city of Los Angeles, regardless of the street address, brings up the same set of numbers.
Fair housing groups and steering laws prevent iPlace from presenting more specific data, Paradise said.
“Our data is either so broad or not too local,” Paradise said. “It’s on a city or county level, but not on a neighborhood level.”
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For previous columns see www.latimes.com/virtual.
