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August 9, 2021

Be Safe By Being Aware with Live Crime Report Data

Here at POM Safe, we’re constantly evaluating better ways to improve personal safety against violent crimes and property crime. The reality is, all U.S cities present unique challenges in how we approach safety.

Because Safety Begins With Awareness

To keep yourself and your loved ones safe, the best method of staying safe is to stay vigilant and aware of your surroundings. In addition to providing the POM Safe personal safety system, we’ve also compiled crime data using a unique grading methodology that cuts through the noise of most complex reports and provides clarity on what types of crime are more frequent in any given city.

Where Are We Getting The Crime Data?

We have partnered with CrimeoMeter, a crime API data provider. CrimeoMeter currently provides data for over 42,000 cities with updated real-time crime data. We’re using the CrimeoMeter API to frequently pull reported crime updates that are used in each of our city reports across America.

What Crimes Do We Cover?

While each City may have variances with how crimes are categorized, we’ve taken a particular focus on violent crime data, property crime data, aggravated assault, burglaries, motor vehicle theft, sexual assault, rape, and other crimes that affect safety in 5 different ways.

The POM Safe 5 Point Scoring System

With the goal of making it easier to understand your personal safety and the violent crime rate for different activities, we’ve developed 5 unique scores.

Outdoor Activities

This covers such activities as running, cycling, walking, going out to parks, or hiking. Violent crimes that are associated with these activities include sexual assault, aggravated assault, simple assault, and rape. We combine these types of reported crimes and calculate this against the total reported population to determine a crime score index that is ranked on a 1 to 10 score. 1 being minimal risk, 10 being the highest risk.

Night Out & Leisure

Typical crimes that are associated with bars, evenings outdoors, dates and clubs are robberies, intimidation, DUI, Disorderly Conduct, and Purse Snatching. We combine these types of reported crimes which can vary by type for each city and calculate the score against the total population. Much like outdoor activities, we rank 1 as the lowest risk, 10 as the highest.

Family

Family-related crimes see the biggest variance across cities in how they are categorized. We have combined crimes that are more frequently reported in the suburbs, with a specific focus on family offenses, domestic abuse, child abuse, and in some cases, weapons violations. We take these scores, calculate against the reported population, and determine risk using our ranking from 1 to 10.

Home & Vehicle

Commonly the highest number of reports across the united states are crimes related to motor vehicles and property. We’ve combined a number of these reported crime types, and have calculated a score that presents the property crime rate taking into account the crime score index and common crime statistics that result in a ranking from 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest risk, 10 being the highest.

Community

While it’s a given to say all crimes can have an effect on the community, we define certain crime activities for the Community Score. Crimes such as forgery, shoplifting, drug and weapon violations have the largest impact on community resources.

What We Are Not Covering

The reality is, crime statistics are complicated. While lists like America’s safest cities or cities with low crime rates are helpful, our goal is to provide a realistic rank of our major cities by how we live.

What We Learned When We Put This Together

There are two primary sources of government crime statistics, the FBI with the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) which compiles data reported by residents across the US. While both provide insight on current crime data, it’s not a full picture that you can easily identify the safest large cities vs unsafest. Basically, it’s still a complex task to compile safety scores in a consistent and intuitive manner.

Finally, when it comes to the crime data itself, a few things surprised us.

Property Crimes such as Property/Larceny and Theft are by far the highest reported crimes, throughout the US.
When it comes to violent crimes, aggravated assault is typically the highest reported crime, with intimidation frequently not far behind.
We’ve found huge variances in the types of reported sexual violent crimes, with some cities listing Sexual Offense/All Other instead of Rape in some instances – we’ve had our work cut out for us to normalize this data across cities.

Some of the Major Cities We’ve Covered

We’ve started by covering the major cities in the US and will continue to update and add more to this list as we collect more data. You can also search by zipcode or city using POM Safe Score.