from Hacker News

Neighborhood Crime Data Doesn’t Belong on Real Estate Sites

by hncurious on 12/14/21, 9:03 PM with 4 comments

  • by dublin on 12/14/21, 11:16 PM

    Why the Hell not? Crime in an area is one of the most important things to consider in deciding where to buy a home, the largest investment most people will ever make.

    (And yes, uncomfortably, but truthfully, crime is correlated to racial makeup in the area, as proven by decades of the FBI's crime stats. Reporting on this data should not be illegal either(data wants to be free, remember?), but it has been since the late 1960s, when the Federal Government forced the Appraisal Institute to rewrite their Appraisal Handbook with the decree by fiat that racial makeup of a neighborhood cannot affect the value of a property. No data-based justification for this was ever provided, because there is none.)

    Reporting crime and other similar neighborhood information on such sites is something buyers should expect and demand.

  • by ipspam on 12/15/21, 12:08 AM

    Problematic white saviour behaviour.

    "And there are troubling signs of this: in the 2019 survey, people reporting crimes were more likely to describe their offender as young, male, and Black than would be expected given the representation of those groups in the population."

    ... representation of those groups in the POPULATION.

    Could it be that young people, Males, and Blacks just commit crimes at high rates than old people, woman, and people with the culturally dominate skin color?

    And even IF there is an equal chance across races that someone is a criminal, say 2% of population, there is also the question of the rates at which they are committing crimes.

  • by Bostonian on 12/14/21, 9:17 PM

    "Reported Crimes May Not Accurately Reflect Actual Crimes"

    Reported data usually has some error. That does not mean you ignore it, unless you have an alternative with less error. People will care less about neighborhood crime data when crime in general is falling. Murder has risen in the U.S. over the last few years.

  • by josephcsible on 12/14/21, 11:13 PM

    I don't think I could ask for a better example of the nirvana fallacy than this.