Darryl Thomas Realty - Research Crime

Research Crime

Most books on buying your first house recommend that you research the crime statistics for your area. We agree, and provide this list of resources for the benefit of our customers. The good news is that Austin and its surrounding areas have pretty low crime compared to other cities around the US making it a little tough to go wrong. Nevertheless, as always, we recommend that every customer and client do their due diligence.

Sex Offenders
Determining the location of sex offenders near you is extremely simple. Texas has its own online database. It’s very simple to use.

Texas Database of Sex Offenders - https://records.txdps.state.tx.us/soSearch/soSearch.cfm

Map Sex Offenders - An intrepid individual has gone through the trouble of integrating the sex offender databases from every state and created another very easy to use system, complete with a map.

Austin

Austin is a pretty big city now. The latest census revealed that the city has grown to over 800,000 people and if you count the neighboring suburbs outside of the city limits, which are part of the Austin metropolis, the count is over 1 million. Unfortunately, crime is present. The following is a list of some links that can help you determine the crime level in your vicinity. We recommend the ZIP code report as a first stop.

First Stop
Austin Crime By ZIP Code - Presents the same information as the Austin Crime Viewer. I find the zip code reports bit easier to use.

Second Stops
Austin Crime Viewer This tool lets you see the number of crimes committed in a neighborhood such as murders and robberies assaults.

CityRating.com has put together a pretty looking visualization of Austin crime rates. A fun page to look at -- at least one time.

Cedar Park & Leander

Perhaps being smaller cities, they have not yet invested in online crime indexes like Austin has. (aka Uniform Crime Reporting) Perhaps the only online source on crime levels is CityRating.com. Unfortunately, it does not go down to a small enough geographic region to really matter for an individual home buyer’s decision.

Cedar Park
http://www.cityrating.com/citycrime.asp?city=Cedar+Park&state=TX

Leander
http://www.cityrating.com/citycrime.asp?city=Leander&state=TX

Cedar Park is a pretty nice place to live as far as the surrounding areas go. It has a not-so-well-known curfew which might be contributing to the peace. It’s a pretty lax curfew, mainly discouraging loitering by the young: http://www.ci.cedar-park.tx.us/index.asp?NID=193

Pflugerville

There is a Pflugerville Police Department
http://tx-pflugerville.civicplus.com/index.asp?NID=59

Unfortunately, it does not publish an online copy of the Uniform Crime Report, so we’ve got no way to look up the stats. It’s unclear even if the department participates in the program.

The best thing we have is the CityRatings.com report. I'm not sure how City Rating got their statistics.
http://www.cityrating.com/citycrime.asp?city=pflugerville&state=TX