Data on crime volume and trends can be helpful for city planning, security planning and budgeting, business recruitment, and more. Placer can help civic leaders compare crime rates for localities to state or national averages, project what crime will look like for specific communities in the future, discover more details about specific crime incidents within an area, and even visualize crime risk for any specific property or market.

You’ll be able to answer these questions after reading this article:

1. How prevalent is crime throughout your community and has it changed over time? 
2. Are specific types of crime more common?
3. How does crime in your market compare to other markets?

Pro Tip: The reports and widgets available in the Markets section may vary per account.

Get started with the following steps:

Step 1: Review the Demographic Profile for AGS CrimeRisk data

a. Open the Placer report for your market, navigate to the Demographics in the left sidebar, and refer to the Demographic Profile widget.

b. Select the AGS CrimeRisk dataset from the drop-down menu as the dataset of choice, with 2024 as the template (to get the most current information). If the dataset is not visible in the menu, click View more Datasets to add it. You can benchmark crime rates against the Nation or State (index scores can be read as percentages. For example, a score of 110 means that the figure is 10% above the base average of 100. A score of 90 represents a figure of 10% below the base average). So in this example, Total Crime in Philadelphia is the same as the national average, and Total Personal Crime is 7% above the national average.

c. If you change the template to 2029 Projection, you can see additional information on how the crime rates are expected to look in 5 years, and thus how crime is trending. In this same example, the 2029 projection shows that Total Crime is expected to increase slightly in this market, but Total Personal Crime is expected to decrease.

Step 2: Identify more specific crime details

Get a more detailed view of crime in your market by breaking down categories like Personal Crime and Property Crime. Click on either header, then scroll down to see the specific types of crime included, and see how your market compares to state or nationwide benchmarks.

Step 3: See how crime in your market compares to others

‍a. Add another market to your report by clicking the plus icon and searching for the market you’d like to compare. Once you’ve selected it from the search results, be sure to click Go to load the comparison.

‍b. Scroll to the Demographic Profile widget, click Compare, and select the second market. Press Apply to generate a side-by-side view of crime activity in both markets, making it easy to assess how your markets stack up against others.

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