Are $50k houses normal for Indianapolis, or are these ghetto prices?

[Chicago76]

Originally Posted by max.b

Hmm... I have to say I don't really trust the "violent crime" stats, because they are easy to manipulate (what counts as violent crime varies, and how much of it is reported varies too). I prefer looking at the murder rates. For Indianapolis, it's 10 per 100,000 residents per year, if Wikipedia isn't lying, which it often is.

I disagree. I picked consistent violent crime stats for all three: murder, robbery, aggravated assault, and rape. STL and Indy use the same method to record their violent crimes. Chicago (the one with the lowest rate) deviates from the UCR and is actually more strict. If a guy robbed a woman, dragged her into an alley, raped her, and killed her, UCR would record one homicide. Chicago would record 1 robbery, 1 rape, and 1 homicide. The definition of what constitutes an aggravated assault, robbery, etc is uniform for all three, however.

The problem with relying strictly upon murder rates for relatively small neighborhoods is sample size. I can live in a neighborhood of 5,000 people that has 50 robberies and aggravated assaults but randomly no murders in a particular year.

I could also live in another neighborhood with zero robberies and assaults all year long, but some guy decides he can't live anymore, shoots his wife and kid, and then kills himself. 2 murders, both of which are purely domestic and of no real threat to me.

If you looked only at homicides, then the first neighborhood appears to be much more safe, when that isn't the case at all. You have to really look at what your threats are as an outside party and how to best measure those, which is the violent crime rate.

[max.b]

Chicago76,

Where do you get your violent crime data for specific neighborhoods?