SafeRoute

Neighbourhood polygons — for the Chicago/NW-Indiana corridor, areas are drawn at neighbourhood scale (Gary Midtown, Tolleston, Glen Park, Downtown Hammond, Indiana Harbor …) rather than whole city limits, so a whole city is never written off. These outlines are approximate and hand-placed from published neighbourhood-level crime reporting — edit or delete any of them.

Live Chicago data — counts are taken straight from the city's open crime feed, aggregated by Socrata across all 77 community areas (no sampling, no truncation), for the last two years.

What counts: homicide, vehicular hijacking (carjacking), robbery, weapons violations, criminal sexual assault, kidnapping, and aggravated assault/battery only.
What does not: theft, burglary, criminal damage, narcotics, deceptive practice and other financial offences, trespass, vice, traffic — and simple or domestic assault/battery, which is very high volume but overwhelmingly indoors between people who know each other, and tells you nothing about driving past.

Offences are weighted both by severity and by how hard they are to reclassify. Departments under pressure to show improvement downgrade offences, and the line that moves is almost always aggravated → simple assault. So homicide (20) and carjacking (10) carry most of the signal — both have paper trails independent of police classification — while aggravated assault (1.5) and weapons violations (1) carry little. Ranking is weighted incidents per km², so a large area isn't flagged just for being large. Homicide counts are shown separately because they're the number least susceptible to being managed. No equivalent open feed exists for Gary or Hammond.

Road classes — motorway/trunk geometry comes from OpenStreetMap so the app can tell an interstate pass-through from surface-street routing.

Suburbs — municipalities like Harvey, Dolton and Blue Island run their own police departments, so they contribute nothing to Chicago's feed and previously had no coverage at all. Each carries its published violent-crime rate per 1,000 (CrimeGrade, FBI UCR derived, 2025) and its tier is calculated from that rate rather than picked by hand: ≥12 high, ≥6 elevated, ≥3.6 (the US average) moderate and off by default, below average not flagged.

Small populations are handled separately. A per-1,000 rate is unreliable when the town is tiny: Ford Heights has ~1,470 residents, so its 8.3 rate is about twelve incidents a year, and three either way moves it by half. Harvey's near-identical 8.5 comes from ~20,000 people and ~170 incidents. Any municipality under 5,000 residents is therefore capped at moderate/opt-in no matter what its rate says, and is labelled small sample. Every entry shows its absolute incidents-per-year alongside the rate, because the raw count tells you more than the ratio does at this scale.

Worth knowing: none of these towns reaches Chicago's citywide rate of ~11, and the highest (Harvey, 8.5) is about 77% of it. Several sit only slightly above the national average. Reputation runs ahead of the numbers in this part of the map, and avoiding a town that is barely above average costs you time for very little. The rate is shown on every entry so you can judge for yourself. Outlines are approximate discs sized to each town's land area.

City-level circles — the national top-10 entries are still coarse radius markers from FBI-based rankings; they exist as a backstop for trips outside the detailed corridor.

Avoidance works with no key. A free ORS key adds exact in-engine avoidance, but its limits are tight (zones ≤200 km²/20 km, trips ≤150 km).