Methodology
How every number is built
Crime Tracker uses only material that is already public. This page states where it comes from, how rates are calculated, and what the figures cannot tell you.
Sources consulted
- FBI Crime Data Explorer and national statistics offices — agency violent- and property-crime aggregates.
- State, provincial and municipal open-data portals — report-level extracts published under open licences.
- Education and campus-safety releases plus public K-12 incident reporting for school-site figures.
- Public-health and vital-statistics releases for injury and fatality context.
- Census, Eurostat and national population estimates used as the denominator for every rate.
How the rates are calculated
- 1. Collect. The published aggregate is pulled exactly as the agency released it — counts stay counts, no imputation, no smoothing.
- 2. Denominator. Every rate is offences per 100,000 residents, using the Census population estimate for the same year as the offence count.
- 3. Geocode. Agency or city figures are mapped onto ZIP areas by postal geography, never by street address.
- 4. Caveat. Each row keeps its agency of record, its extract date and the reporting caveats the agency published with it.
- 5. Restate. When an agency revises a year, the revised figure replaces the old one and the change is logged publicly.
Known limitations
- A rate describes reports filed with an agency, not everything that happened. Under-reporting differs by place and by country, so comparisons across postal areas carry real uncertainty.
- Postal codes are delivery routes, not neighbourhoods or police beats. A code can straddle several jurisdictions with different reporting standards and different legal definitions of the same offence.
- An area showing no major incidents is reporting a record, not a guarantee. Absence of a filed report is not evidence that nothing happened.
- Agencies revise their published figures after release. Totals here reflect the last public extract and can move when an agency restates a year.
- National baselines differ by country; the 363.8 comparison line is the US violent-crime rate and is shown for scale only where a comparable figure exists.
- Nothing on this portal predicts what will happen to any person or place, and nothing here identifies a victim, witness, suspect or household.
- Ranking an area is a reading of public records, not a statement about the people who live there.