Tag Archives: NBCChicago

The most dangerous American neighborhoods

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Walletpop.com has its second annual list of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America:

For the second year in a row, using exclusive data developed by Dr. Andrew Schiller’s team at NeighborhoodScout.com, and based on FBI data from all 17,000 local law enforcement agencies, WalletPop reveals the top 25 most dangerous neighborhoods with the highest predicted rates of violent crime in America.

This year, Chicago took the not-so coveted top spot from Cincinnati for the most dangerous neighborhood, while Atlanta has the highest number of neighborhoods making the list (four).

You may ask, why neighborhoods and not cities? Schiller explains that even the cities with the highest crime rates can have relatively safe neighborhoods, and thus it is less useful to generalize about an entire city.

The reason for looking at neighborhoods rather than cities is a good one – most American cities are quite large so city-level data is not very useful. To see the data for the Chicago neighborhood that tops the list, check out this page.

NBCChicago.com seems to have made an interpretation error with the data:

According to the info, anyone walking down Lake Street between Damen and Western has a 1 in 4 chance of being a victim of a crime.  Those who choose to live there face the same odds with the chances of being robbed.
As far as I can tell, the neighborhood crime rates apply to people living there for a full year, not people just walking in the neighborhood.
The website that this crime data was developed for, neighborhoodscoutreports.com, seems like it has some interesting proprietary data. When you enter a zip code, you can purchase a full report – though they leak out a few interesting tidbits. According to the website, zip code 60187 (Wheaton, IL) is “More sophisticated than 97%of U.S. neighborhoods. More walkable than 65%.”