Suburb Analysis: Crime Statistics

Another ad hoc question I want to explore is how much crime is there in the selected suburbs? As with travel time, the answer may be information bearing, but will likely have little effect on final house selection.

Crime data is provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and they provide lots of crime related data, such as Crime and Safety in Australia. I found the Victorian police webpage much more easier to get the answers I wanted. Specifically, they provide a Crime Statistics Report, and more usefully a Crime Statistics for You Area Portal which I used.

The crime data is organized into divisions, so I first determined the divisions for my suburbs of interest:

• Division ND5: Preston, Thornbury, Reservoir
• Division ND4: Coburg, North Coburg
• Division ED1: Chadstone, Hawthorn (for reference)
• Division ND1: Kensington

I then gathered the crime statistics for 2009 and 2010 for these divisions into a spreadsheet. The graphs in this post provide a summary of cherry picked interesting crime statistics. I have provided some qualitative summaries, although take them with a grain of salt. Divisions are based on local councils and whatever other unknown criteria. They very likely cover different sized geographical areas with likely quite different size populations. Hence, comparing them directly may not be very meaningful!

The following graph provides a summary of total crime on the divisions of interest. This stacked bar graph shows the breakdown of total crime. The graph suggests that ND1 has 6 times more total crime in 2010 than ED1. It also suggests some relative parity in total crime between ND5 and ND4. It is in interesting the total 'crime against people' in ND1 is not that far off the total crime in ED1.

The following graph provides a summary of some specific types of crime in the same districts in 2009 and 2010. One can only assume that ND1 is a much large district than the other three. Interestingly, the data shows that Burglary (Residential) is much higher in ND5 than the other divisions.

It is interesting that this data is out there to be played with, even if it is not as easy as it could be to gather. I am not sure what one can learn from the raw data. It is probably a much better idea to read the reports from the state police or ABS.

I was a little disappointed in searching for source data. I expected their to be cool interactive maps of crime for Australian capital cities, as there is for many cities in the states (also cool stats). They may be out there, but I couldn't find them. Even house price heat maps are missing here, there are really awesome equivalents for the states like hotpads.