How to look up crime data yourself

Every crime map, including ours, starts from public records. You can look at many of them yourself, for free, in about an hour. Here is the order that works best, from national numbers down to a single block.

1. The FBI’s numbers for the police department

The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer has yearly figures for each police department and sheriff’s office that reports, with charts and downloads. Find the agency that covers the address. A city address may be covered by the city police; an unincorporated one by the county sheriff. The FBI asks people not to use these figures to rank places.

Check first whether the agency reported a full year. Our guide to which states report crime data explains the gaps.

2. The city’s own open data

Many cities publish every reported crime, updated daily or weekly. Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle all do. To protect victims, locations are shifted to the block or the hundred block, so you can see a street but not a house.

Read the notes. Chicago, for example, warns that its dataset shouldn’t be used to compare across years.

3. Know what you’re looking at: reports or calls

Some cities publish calls for service as well as reported crimes. They’re not the same. A call is any request for police: a noise complaint, a welfare check, a lost wallet. The Vera Institute, a criminal-justice reform group, studied 911 calls in nine cities in 2022. Most weren’t about crime at all. In six of the nine cities, violent crime was under 3% of calls. A busy call log doesn’t mean a lot of crime.

4. Ask for specific records

For an incident report, ask the police department. Every state has its own public records law, and what you can get varies. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press publishes a state-by-state guide.

Many departments also hold community meetings or have a crime analyst who can answer general questions about an area.

5. Remember what none of it counts

All of this is crime reported to police. A federal survey of crime victims estimates that only about a third to a half of violent crimes are reported. The share depends on how the question is asked. Most property crimes are reported even less often, car theft being the exception. Reporting also differs from place to place. These records count events. They say nothing about the people who live there.

A faster way to start

Our crime lookup for an address pulls these sources together for one place, and the crime rate layer shows rates across a whole area.