Methodology - 25 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods in America

Exclusive Neighborhood Crime Information
NeighborhoodScout.com collects data from all 17,000 local law enforcement agencies in America, and uses a relational database to aggregate the statistics from each agency to the municipality that they protect. This provides an accurate representation of the total crimes and actual crime rates within any given city or town.

NeighborhoodScout then uses proprietary computer models it develops to statistically estimate incidences of both violent and property crimes for every sub-zip code neighborhood in the U.S based on the aggregate crime data for the municipality containing that neighborhood averaged across the most recent three years of non-preliminary (final) data available from the FBI (2005, 2006, and 2007). This moving three-year window helps stabilize data where a single year could be uncharacteristically high or low, providing a more accurate risk assessment. It is important to note that very recent changes in a neighborhood may not be reflected in our findings, as we use non-preliminary data in our models that take a year to be released.

Why neighborhoods and not cities? Even the cities with the highest crime rates in America can have relatively safe neighborhoods, and thus it is less useful to generalize about an entire city. But using exclusive data developed by Dr. Schiller at NeighborhoodScout.com, and based on FBI data from all 17,000 local law enforcement agencies, we here report those specific neighborhoods in America that have the highest predicted rates of violent crime of all.

Violent crimes included are the violent crimes from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, armed robbery, and aggravated assault. Based on multiple years of data, and predicted to the individual neighborhood level by NeighborhoodScout's exclusive crime models, we list the top 25 most dangerous. The rating is based on the predicted number of violent crimes in the neighborhood per 1,000 population of the neighborhood.

NeighborhoodScout reveals and maps the neighborhoods, and reports the predicted number of violent crimes, property crimes, the violent crime rate per 1,000, the property crime rate per 1,000, the density of crimes per square mile, and a neighborhood resident