WalkScore Debuts Neighborhood-by-Neighborhood Crime Grade Rating System

• September 9th 2014

by Lark Turner

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WalkScore — the company best-known for telling you just how easy it is to access things on foot from a given address — recently debuted a new feature that maps crime across cities. Here’s what a map of DC looks like under the new rating system.

The new feature was rolled out across DC on Tuesday. It enables users to input an address and get a property and personal crime “grade” for the area around the address. Called Crime Grade, the feature ranks neighborhoods from A-D in both personal and property crimes intended to reflect each person’s per capita risk of being affected by crime, according to an explanation of the new feature.

That’s more important than how many crimes take place in a given area, WalkScore says.

“Other crime maps and statistics often make walkable neighborhoods with lots of people (e.g. Downtowns) seem unsafe because they only measure how many crimes are reported — not the per capita crime rate,” the company’s Matt Lerner explained in a blog post.

The company’s Crime Grade algorithm also uses a “patent-pending system” that “weights crimes by severity and distance.”

DC is one of the first cities to receive the new feature. The company says 10 violent crimes and 56 property crimes occur per 1,000 people every year in the District.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/walkscore_debuts_neighborhood_crime_grade_rating_system/8953.