Crime in Las Vegas
Here is a graphic that color codes the incident levels of the various zip codes in Las Vegas. We chose incidents because they most represent the actual annoyance felt by most of us by nuisance crime and disturbances. They also correlate very well with violent crime. The only significant differences will be on the borders between the classes. Some of the mixed neighborhoods have lots of nuisance but little violence and move up at the expense of the more staid neighborhoods.
Baically Green is the best 25%, Yellow the next 25%, Orange the next and Red the worst 25%
Here is a PDF version that is likely easier to read...click
This presentation is the first that includes all zip codes in the Valley. We have used the data from the crime view sites run by Metro, Henderson Police Department and the North Las Vegas Police Dept. the zip code data from Metro and the North Las Vegas Police Department. The presentation by the three sites is not the same so we have had to use a little windage. This data however has a very wide range so the relative magnitudes should be similar. enough. Note that it is not the same as the FBI definition so you can't compare these to the national numbers...The comparison within a given Police Dept is probably pretty good. The comparison between Departments is not as precise. . The populaton data is the July 2007 data built by Clark County using housing data. It is far and away the best and most timely estimate we have had.
This view includes Henderson which seems to have the best data of the Departments. the data has been manipulated to make it comparable. How I did this will be published here along with the raw data and the manipulations done. If you really want to know how the sausage was made go there.
Note that zip codes are a crude measure. The highest crime area in town 89109 actually has two completely different mechanisms...the huge number of tourist on the strip is one part and a very nasty area to the northern end the other. I think the strip piece to actually be quite safe...but the northern piece is pretty dangerous.
Unless having good local knowledge I would avoid the red and pretty much the orange. Go for the green and fall back to the yellow. For the knowledgable there are some quite nice localities in the orange and even in the red. But you need to know what you are doing.
Violent Crimes
For the moment we are going to punt on violent crime. In general it tends to be strongly central city oriented. We have examined the CrimeView data and reached the obvious conclusion that the boys are cooking the books. There have, for instance, been no Homicides anywhere in Las Vegas for the last 60 days. We doubt that. Lilewise you apparently cannot commit a rape in the Metro jurisdiction. We also doubt that. We would try to cobble together a view but consider the data too suspect for that. The North Las Vegas data is much better but we need Metro for anything meaningful.
Burglary -
One of the things that drives the homeowner crazy is burglary. And burglary has a significantly different pattern than overall crime..
For a higher quality version click here.
The pattern is vastly more distributed than crime in general. Now we see red outside the central city and orange out to the borders. Even Summerlin and Desert Shores are impacted. And some of the rougher neighborhoods do relatively well. The overall range is about 10 to 1. And the range for the middle..the yellow and orange is less than 2:1. So a few quite good...a few quite bad...and a widely dispersed but relatively uniform middle.
Stolen Cars
Here is a similar map considering only stolen cars. The range by zip code is over 20 to 1. The strip, downtown and nearby areas are much of the problem. The red zips are over half the stolen cars.
For a high quality version of this map click here
