How to check crime near an address

Put an address in the box above and we will show you the crime rate for the area around it, which police agency’s data that comes from, and everything else we know about the location on one screen. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and it works anywhere in the United States.

The rest of this page is about how to read what comes back — which is the part that actually matters, and the part most crime sites skip.

What you get

• A crime-rate band for the small area around that address, not for the whole city. Cities routinely contain both the safest and the least safe places in their region, so a city-wide figure describes almost nobody.
• The police agency that covers the address, so you know whose reporting the figure rests on. That matters more than it sounds — see below.
• Everything else we know about the spot — flood zone, wildfire hazard, schools, commute, cost, and the rest of the layers — because crime is rarely the only question about a place.

What we will not do

We will not give you a letter grade for a neighborhood. Those feel decisive and hide every judgement that went into them, and they are the main reason two crime sites can describe the same street completely differently.

We also do not invent a number where we do not have one. Some areas are covered by agencies that report very little, and where the data is too thin to mean anything the map shows nothing rather than a reassuring blank — here is why that matters.

Where the numbers come from

Crimes reported to police, counted in small census areas, adjusted for how many people live there so two places can be compared fairly. The data comes from the FBI’s national collection and, for some cities, directly from the police department’s own published records.

The full detail — including why we leave some areas blank — is on how we measure neighborhood crime.

Things worth knowing before you read the result

• It counts reported crime. Reporting rates differ between places and between types of crime, and nobody has good data on what goes unreported.
• It describes an area, not an address. Two ends of a street can differ, and no dataset in the country is finer than this honestly.
• It is historical. It tells you what happened, not what happens next.
• It says nothing about the people who live there. It is a count of events in an area. That is all it is, and it should not be read as anything more.

If you are house hunting

A single address is a fine place to start, but the more useful move is usually the other direction: set the level of safety you want and see which areas clear it, then add your commute and your budget on top. That turns a whole metro into a short list.

You can do that on the crime map, and stack a commute or a rent ceiling on top of it.