<p>Just found this website:</p>
<p>Top</a> 100 most dangerous places to live in the USA - Neighborhood Scout</p>
<p>and you can also put in the zipcode to see the area around your student's school.</p>
<p>In the vast majority of cases, the number of rapes, sexual assaults, assaults, burglaries, destruction of property, etc. incidents on campus (committed by students upon other students) far exceeds those off campus, even in so-called “dangerous” neighborhoods.</p>
<p>The overwhelming majority go unreported.</p>
<h1>4 is “University, FL”? No such place! There’s something wrong with that list.</h1>
<p>Huh??! A city I used to live in is rated 7th worst. I never thought it was bad. The best sources of info I’ve found are student newspapers and city newspapers. I’ve found crime to be much worse than what was reported on my son’s school web site (Cleary Act), but it just may have increased dramatically due to the poor economy.</p>
<p>No. The vast majority of on-campus crimes are never reported to the Cleary Act clearinghouse.</p>
<p>I was playing with NeighborhoodScout yesterday, and something is <em>seriously</em> wrong with their data (possibly because not every neighborhood reports everything to the clearinghouse?). They claimed that Louisville, where I used to live, has only three violent crimes per year. I don’t think there was ever a year that I lived there when there were fewer than 25 <em>homicides</em> per year in the city. And they claimed that neighborhoods that I would be unwilling to walk through in broad daylight were among the safest 1% in the country. Meanwhile, some very nice areas were labeled as relatively unsafe, possibly because their methodology counts a theft of a GPS unit from somebody’s car the same as a homicide.</p>
<p>Their Boston map was less egregious than their Louisville map (which was so bad that I was actually extremely upset that people might be using this data to make decisions, and am considering writing them a letter), but I still found it suspicious. The area around BU is not fantastic, but it is not worse than the worst parts of Roxbury and Dorchester. Of course, if you count somebody’s sneakers being stolen out of their gym locker the same as a gang shooting, it might indeed skew the picture.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, this list of Top 100 most “dangerous” places to live, once again, doesn’t separate property crime from violent crime. While I don’t want people stealing my hypothetical GPS unit out of my hypothetical car, I don’t consider it in the same league as being raped or mugged. I’d like to have seen two lists, so that people could take both sets of data into account, but look at them separately.</p>
<p>Edited to add: I just looked at their list of safest cities and saw that Louisville was #5. That is really distressing to me! I mean, I like Louisville, and it’s a nice city, but their incorrect data is painting a bizarre utopian picture that might actually influence people! And if this happened with Louisville, I wonder how many other cities in their database have the same problem!</p>
<p>It is difficult being the parent, reading the e-mail about the brutal rape that occured at a party house that you know your child frequents. It was a year long assault to my senses knowing about the muggings, rapes, and burgularies right around the campus. I think some schools are more open with this information than others. We never received any information from our other childrens schools. I am really not sure which is better-knowing when there is nothing you can do, or not knowing and hoping that everything you have already discussed about safety is being practiced. </p>
<p>As a result of all the messages we received from this one school, I am not sure what to think regarding the others. They obviously do not report to parents but whether they report everything is something I will never know.</p>
<p>I also don’t know honestly if I would be able to stand getting this type of news from all of their schools. I WOULD NEVER SLEEP.</p>
<p>I looked at that site, too. Bizarre!</p>
<p>According to the site, my immediate neighborhood is the 3rd most expensive in the city (not true, but not nuts), and gets a safety rating of 71/100. If I cross the street and walk one block, I enter what the site calls the most expensive neighborhood in the city (also not true, but not nuts), with a safety rating of . . . 8! Huh? They’re not even different neighborhoods, really. (If you vote at the same polling place in the same division, and you take the train at the same station, and your dogs poop on each other’s lawns, it’s the same neighborhood.) Anyway, no actual person can tell the difference between my safe neighborhood and the hotbed of urban crime and million-dollar homes that seems to sit a block away. </p>
<p>There WAS a rash of burglaries, recently, in BOTH neighborhoods, but a SOM whose daughter’s credit cards were taken (along with the family’s silver, china, and electronics) assembled evidence that let the police ID and capture the burglars, so that’s over. I can’t remember seeing a report of a violent crime in either area, ever. Private school kids having outdoor drinking parties is a constant warm-month hazard, though.</p>
<p>Our newspaper puts out a map each week with little symbols, each signifying a type of crime. I think it’s great to keep informed. I made a map of my son’s college city and now plot the crimes on it. It may help when he has to get an apartment in another year. In the meantime, we’ve talked about the areas and he’s agreed that he would transfer if he or a close friend become the victim of a crime. That almost happened last year, when his roomate was chased several blocks on his way back to the dorm.</p>