Two lenses on the same island: our approach to area data

Two readings of the same island rarely agree, and we think that disagreement is the point. We keep each signal on its own axis and describe what was recorded, rather than collapse everything into a single score.

The dark figure

Criminologists call it the dark figure of crime: the incidents that happen but never reach a police record. Decades of victimization research show a large share of incidents are never reported, and reporting rates differ by type of incident and by neighborhood. A low recorded count is therefore not proof of a low true count. Community reporting captures part of that gap, and it captures things no police record holds at all.

Why we never reconcile the two

A community report is an allegation; an official record is an entry in a public system. Summing them would double-count some incidents and invent a precision neither source has. So we keep them as two separate, clearly labeled signals, and we treat the places where they diverge as the interesting finding, descriptively, never as a verdict.

Descriptive, on purpose

We do not predict, score, grade, rank, or label a place "safe" or "dangerous." Describing public-record facts in a stated past period is both more honest and more useful: it tells an operator what the record shows for their area without pretending to forecast what comes next. That discipline is the product's identity, and its credibility.

See what an area looks like in depth