What do city-wide crime rates actually correlate with? A statistical dive into neighborhood crime rates in five cities.
Do city-wide crime rates really indicate anything important or useful to us? When people look at crime rates, they’re typically looking to find out how dangerous or violent an area is. Crime rates are mostly widely presented as nation-wide crime rates or city-wide crime rates. Cities are large areas and anyone who has lived in a city knows that crime and danger are not evenly spaced out in that city. There’s always a “bad part of town” and a “good part of town”. We all understand then that city-wide crime rates do not tell us how violent or dangerous the entire city is. So, what do city-wide crime rates actually tell us? Do they correlate with how dangerous the most dangerous neighborhoods in a city are? Do they correlate with how dangerous the downtown area is? Do they correlate with something else? Do they correlate with nothing? That is what I’m trying to find out today. As someone who’s looked at crime rates in neighborhoods a lot throughout the last decade of my life ( dunno, it’s...