Crime Stats Home
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About This Site
Purpose
This site was created and is maintained so that basic Houston crime statistics can be easily accessed and displayed geographically as a reference to potentially "safer" or "more dangerous" areas and to offer historical comparison of crime rates in a given geographical area enabling visitors to this website to educate themselves, and become better informed as to their surroundings and the goings-on in their neighborhood.
Usage
Visitors to this website can view Houston crime statistics for a given month and year, displayed geographically near a given address and/or zip code. Each incident can be viewed in greater detail including offense dates/times, a generic description of the crime, such as "Theft", "Burglary" or "Forcible Rape" and the street address by nearest block.
Terms of Use and Disclaimer
By using this service and website, you agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions.
The data, and result available through this site have been gathered from third party sources and have been
compiled together using automated means. The resulting information has not been verified nor confirmed by
a human. Additionally, the underlying data used is not completely accurate. It is intended for your personal
reference only and should not be the sole basis of any conclusions, decisions, or studies. Please also read
the disclaimer below in it's entirety.
This service was designed, and is made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use
this service to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such
as advertising sales. You may not take the results from this service and reformat and display them, or mirror the
home page or results pages on your Web site. If you want to make commercial use of this service, you must
enter into an agreement with me to do so in advance. Please contact me for more information.
You may not send automated queries of any sort to this system without express permission in advance from me.
Note that "sending automated queries" includes, among other things:
* using any software which sends automated queries;
* "meta-searching" this site; and
* performing "offline" searches on the site.
Please do not write to me requesting permission to "meta-search" this site for a research project, or any other uses as such requests will not be granted. This service was designed using freely available services, and I encourage you to develop your own similar service under the Creative Commons license.
Statistical data used on this site is obtained from the City of Houston's website. Crime statistics are generally updated on their site about a month late, meaning the previous months data is made available around the end of the current month. It may take additional time for me to process this data and add it into this system.
Regarding the use of Houston's crime statistic data, as stated on The City Of Houston website:
"It is important for users of crime statistics data on the Houston Police Department web site to understand that the primary objective is to generate a reliable set of crime statistics for use in law enforcement administration, operation, and management. HPD does not provide this data as a method of determining if one police beat or area of the city is safer or more dangerous than any other beat or area. Police beats and districts vary in size, population, and density, making such comparisons difficult.
The public may rely on this data for information on the fluctuation in the level and types of crime from year to year; and, criminologists, sociologists, legislators, city planners, and other students of criminal justice may use them in conjuction with other data for a variety of research and planning purposes.
Since crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors, HPD discourages data users from performing comparative analysis betweens beats, districts, or any other division of the city based solely on the information provided here. This web site does not provide a comparative analysis."
Additionally, the results displayed on this site have a larger margin of error due to the problems that arise when geocoding the addresses provided in the raw crime data. Geocoding is the process of converting a given address to the actual Latitude and Longitude coordinates for displaying on a map. On average, about 5 percent of the crimes for a given month either contain no address or is unable to be automatically geocoded. If you have lived in Houston for any length of time, you have become familiar with the confusion surrounding the roads and addresses here. As testiment to this, even Houston's finest cannot seem to enter correct addresses 100 percent of the time.
This website is provided free of charge as a service to the community. The data is freely available, and it utilizes
open source tools and software to make them available on this site. However, there are still costs for web hosting, geocoding lookups, and the time I put into it.
Geocoding information comes from Geocoder.us, and due to the bulk nature plus to make the site faster I pay for their lookups instead of using the free service.
Additionally, when I receive new data I attempt to geocode as many addresses as possible to enable the radius lookups
available from this site. Approx. 9,000 records are in each database, so by the time I seperate out all the unique addresses
and compare against the existing "cached" addresses, there may be as many as 7,500-8,000 records left to geocode.
Due to the confusion in naming of Houston streets, and to account for input errors, I run up to 8 different tests on
an address in an attempt to get a geocode match, stopping on the first successfull single match. (1200 SW Fwy Ser Rd N, 1200 SW Fwy N, 1200 SW Freeway North, etc...) Some queries get no
result, others get more than one, in either case it narrows down the address to get a more precise answer and runs it
again.
This service comes out of my pocket with no sponsors or advertisers. This is why I have made a donation option available for those who have found this service useful or informative and who wish to help me
keep it running and up to date. Simply use the button below to donate any amount you like, I soncerely appreciate
any and all help you can provide.