Depends on how the map is being used. If I'm looking to avoid traveling through neighborhoods with a high robbery risk (e.g. as a tourist), I'd prefer absolute numbers vs. per capita.
That's probably not the correct analysis, because the number you're trying to estimate is not P(a crime occurs near you), it's P(you will personally be the victim of a crime). Crime rate over density won't necessarily do that either (since the population density of a primarily commercial+touristy area, e.g. Fisherman's Wharf, is << the number of people who are present there on a given day), but neither does raw count.
As a tourist in SF recently I was interested in seeing the whole city, warts and all, and I did.
I don't really understand why as a tourist you'd want to use this map for a short trip, unless you were going somewhere that's a literal war zone. Most cities just aren't statistically dangerous for a tourist unless you go out looking for trouble. You're much better off applying common sense than digging through digital maps of (reported) crimes.
If I was looking for somewhere to live then it would be more interesting I think.
>> If I was looking for somewhere to live then it would be more interesting I think.
When I was looking at places to live in South Carolina, Florida and places in the Northwest like Oregon and Idaho, it was interesting to see some of the crime maps and grades these sites gave for crime.
In small coastal towns in Florida, they had small populations and were essentially tourist towns or inhabited by "snow birds" people who live in Northern states who live there during the Winter. Several of the places got D's or F's for crime. I was just shocked, but reading the footnotes, they made it clear that the numbers could be skewed because of the transit population or other factors like Spring Break revelers who come down, get in fights, people get assaulted, or sometimes killed and suddenly a small town's crime rate goes through the roof because of an outlier event that year.
It just made me leery about any statistics you see online with cool heat maps or grades they give to certain areas.
As an aside, the same thing was evident in small rural towns in the mountains in Idaho as well which also got poor grades for crime. It aligns more with your comment, it you go looking for trouble, chances are, you're going to find it.
Yes, data and statistics aren't a substitute for careful thought. You shouldn't throw them out but you definitely can't outsource your thinking to them either.
That's part of why online forums can be nice: a well moderated one can be great at pointing out blind spots in your thinking.
I, as a tourist, would very much prefer being able to walk around looking at random things and relaxing instead of being on the lookout for people trying to steal my things or worse.
Also, when on a trip, getting my phone stolen, for example, is much more of a hassle than having it stolen on the street where I live. Bonus points for thieves actually going for bags and such, so now it's likely you'll need to pay a visit to your embassy or whatever to have your passport replaced, too. In the city where I live, if my ID gets stolen, I'm likely to have at least a different form at home, and I also pretty much know where and when to go to the authorities to try to obtain a replacement.
Speaking of SF, I have no idea if my country even has any kind of representation there, where it would be, how I would get there, and how long it would take to have temporary papers made up, especially without a phone or similar device.
This seems like the best use-case, finding a place to live in a city. As a SF-area resident I know the Tenderloin is a no-go zone, but besides that not much. This is a good tool to see which neighborhoods to focus my search on in the apartment-finding process.
I dunno, I'd think car break-ins would at least be a very important statistic.
My wife and I will be spending a day in the Fisherman's Wharf area, and the statistics on car break-ins has me concerned, though a co-worker who lives in the Bay told me that if I'm parked in a parking garage, it's less likely I'll be a victim, as it's harder to smash-and-grab-and-go when you have to deal with a parking gate.
Yeah we parked across from the Exploratorium near there for several hours and it was fine, I didn’t think to consult crime heat maps before visiting, just followed standard common sense of not leaving visible ipads etc in the car.
> I'd also be pretty interested in avoiding P(a crime occurs near you), especially as a tourist
What counts as nearby also scales with density. Down the street is nearby in the suburbs. In New York the next avenue block may as well be another town.
Yeah there are only 24 hours in a day, so the right metric might be density of crimes in an area per hour. Even if I’m not the victim of a robbery, I don’t really want to be watching it from across the street.