There are preconceived notions that certain quadrants of the city are more prone to crime than others. Just by looking at random newspaper articles and viewing bits and pieces of information sometimes you can come to conclusions which are valid, or quite invalid but appear accurate to the naked eye.

I decided to take some raw crime data and analyze the different quadrants of the city to see what the real dispatch calls for service would show and how it compared to peoples current judgments.

Here is a chart I developed, using Rochester Police Department calls for service from January 1, 2007 through June 30, 2007, and also in parenthesis compared the numbers to the same six month period one year earlier. I separated the calls based on reported addresses, and excluded for clarity any address direction that did not conform to the set of “NW”, “NE”, “SW”, “SE”. A certain small segment of addresses with just “N”, “E”, “S”, or “W” were excluded because of this filter, but I believe the chart is still relevant and shows accurate trends.

Also keep in mind, this is just showing you numbers, but higher numbers don’t always mean worse crime is happening. Higher numbers of calls for service may also be an indication of neighborhoods in that area taking their neighborhood watch duties seriously and reporting perhaps more incidents than a different neighborhood which may not report as much suspicious activity. This information is provided as-is, allowing you to take it and form your own educated opinions.

An observant reader commented to me that the above numbers are hard to put into perspective without a population frame of reference for each section of the city. This is a very good point! So, I have gathered the population numbers from online census estimates for the year 2005 (about the best I could find).

• Northwest (55901) - 43,466
• Southwest (55902) - 19,140
• Northeast (55906) - 16,629
• Southeast (55904) - 25,127

So, to put the number of crimes into perspective, here is a table on the number of reported incidents per 10,000 people for each quadrant of the city:

To analyze more indepth the types of crime incidents in your neighborhood, visit our neighborhood crime report mapping tool, or to view a more broad picture of crime incidents in Rochester, you can use our advanced crime mapping and reporting tool.