About Crime Radar
Crime Radar helps you check an area's safety before you move there. Here's exactly where the numbers come from and how they're calculated — no black box.
State-level crime and poverty statistics come from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, individual state crime agencies, and the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Most figures reflect 2023, with a few states using 2024 data where that was the most recently published. Every state page links its exact sources — you can check the primary data yourself rather than take our word for it.
Gender and race breakdowns show national FBI arrest data, since the FBI doesn't publish state-by-state breakdowns by sex or race — every state page uses the same national figures for those two tabs.
Each state's violent and property crime rates (per 100,000 residents) are added into a single combined index. Every state is then scored 0–100 based on where its index falls relative to all 50 states — 100 means the lowest crime index in the country, 0 means the highest. That score maps to a letter grade: roughly A for the safest states, F for the highest-crime states.
Important: this is a relative ranking, not an absolute safety certification — a state graded "C" isn't necessarily dangerous, it just sits in the middle of the national distribution. And because the underlying data is state-level, the grade describes the whole state, not the specific city or neighborhood you're checking.
Area Scan searches recent news coverage mentioning crime in the city you enter, using a live news API. It shows you what's actually being reported — not a computed score for that specific city (we don't have city-level crime statistics; see the safety grade section above for what is state-level and computed). Think of it as a quick "what's been in the news here lately" check, meant to sit alongside the state's overall grade, not replace it.
Crime Radar is a small independent project. It's supported by display advertising, which helps cover the cost of keeping the data, the news lookups, and the infrastructure running. Ads don't affect what data is shown or how any grade is calculated.