3 Ways To Check If Your Neighborhood is Safe

Check The Crime Rates in Your Neighborhood

Every homeowner wants to know that their neighborhood is safe. It’s an especially important consideration for those who are moving their families into a new neighborhood, in a new city. Safety should always be on the forefront of your mind when purchasing a new home. However, even if you’ve lived in your neighborhood for a while, it’s a good idea to stay up-to-date on local crime rates. That can help you to know whether you need to make any security updates. So, how exactly do you check if your neighborhood is safe? We’ll go over three websites you can use exactly for this purpose:

CrimeReports

CrimeReports’ map feature is cool because it allows you to see the exact number of crimes that have occurred in a specific city/neighborhood by placing small icons on a map. The icons designate what kind of crime happened. For example, ring icons represent home burglary, car icons represent car burglary, fist icons represent assault, and so on. Clicking on an icon will open a window with a description of the crime, including the address where it occurred.

Neighborhood Scout

3 ways to check if your neighborhood is safe - neighborhood scout map

 

Neighborhood Scout’s color coded map feature lets you search for crime rates by address, zip code, or city. Doing so will pull up a map of criminal activity in a color coded density grid so that you can quickly and easily identify neighborhoods with high crime rates. Further down the page it goes into more detail and specifies the total number of crimes for the area you’re searching and breaks the crime down into property and violent crimes. 

 

It’s easy to understand their rating system: safety scores range between 1-100 with 100 being the safest rating. Thus, if your area’s rating is 72, it means that location is safer than 72% of all other areas in the country. Is also shows data related to school rankings, demographics, and home prices. It’s a good resource for families researching neighborhoods to move into. 

Spot Crime

Of the three sites listed in this post, Spot Crime has the nicest geographical interface and is very intuitive to use and interpret. It’s similar to CrimeReports. It provides good, timely information at your searched location. However, like CrimeReports, it’s better for finding out more about specific crimes, not for understanding general crime rates.

So, To Sum Up…

You’ll never be able to fully avoid crime in any neighborhood or city. It’s a part of the landscape of urban life. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t select areas where you’re less likely to be targeted for a crime. Hopefully, by using the resources we’ve given you, you’ll be able to get a clear picture of the security situation of your neighborhood and be able to make decisions about how to deal with it.

Remember, for help with your residential lock and key security in Miami, State Locks and Keys is here to help. Give us a call anytime.