When considering an area, do you use the local crime reports/police blotter as a deciding factor? (renting)

[Serious Conversation]

My hometown has a specific section on the newspaper for a "police blotter." They always like to use the most sensational, dumb crimes to plaster across the front page. While it is a high crime area, the impression you'd get from the local paper is that it's a town chock full of nothing but drug addicts, sexual deviants, and white trash. The local population is more normal than you'd see on the local paper.

Do you base your decisions to move or not to move somewhere off of police reports?

[SDPMiami]

Originally Posted by Emigrations

Do you base your decisions to move or not to move somewhere off of police reports?

I never once consulted police reports.

If I visited an area thinking of renting and especially buying and I detected a lot of criminal elements, I would probably reconsider just depending on how extreme it is.

But this coming from someone who lived in high crime areas, there is nothing desirable about them except low rent. There are plenty of low QOL issues, like blight but also lack of shops, grocery stores, and poor selection in said stores. When I lived in a worse area in Detroit, there was one subway, and liquor stores. That was it. Who in the right mind would care to live there? You're basically living in suburbia with the amount of urban amenities you have at your disposal.

So even if someone could guarantee me I would never be a victim of crime, my family would never be a victim, my property would never be a victim, (something you can't do anywhere) I'd still not move because of the other issues I mentioned.

Too much crime just sucks the area dry.

[UsernameCreativity]

I never looked at police reports until I joined this site. Now that I've looked, I know for certain that I'm not going to use these things to determine what areas are actually safe or not. When I consider a place, I'm judging books by cover. I can look around a neighborhood and and get a good idea if it's run down because people living there just have low paying jobs or if it's run down because of heavy gang activity. I can tell if a 'nice' area is actually a high theft neighborhood, which makes me feel incredibly unsafe, no matter how nice the landscaping looks. It makes a difference what sort of crime will be around.

Part of this is experience in having lived in a whole lot of different places and environments. A bigger part is just being decent at reading scenes and people.

[DubbleT]

Seriously? Look, in most places the police blotter is basically an entertainment piece. Anybody stupid enough to base any sort of life altering decision on that kind of 'information' probably deserves what they get.