Ghetto Tracker - A rating system to help people avoid the bad parts of town
ghettotracker.com
ghettotracker.com
I see Compton, California just added. They should simply geotag by ethnicity and save people the need to subjectively "rate" certain areas?
PS Actually double checked. There was only one photo, and this is why I mentioned that in my comment.
EDIT: Ok, actually I think it's either satire or just deliberate provocation, based on the FB page: http://imgur.com/uqKJrW8 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ghetto-Tracker/42731611071296...
Then since I've lived in both the ghetto-est of ghettos in my lifetime and seen guns drawn at me and etc - it'd be a dream job to drive around and judge the ghetto-ness of a neighborhood. Even make a reality show out of it.
Great minds think alike.
The areas that end up with negative ratings would have to be rated such by users of all ethnicities, which more or less rules out too strong a correlation with race here.
The only problem is if somehow only a single ethnic group, like white people, uses this.
So, basically, I don't think this is going to be an accurate source of information here. At the same time, if it were to actually get widespread usage, I don't think it would be as bad as some people are making it out to be.
Ultimately, though, why not use something like city-data? The site is ugly as sin but it has basically all the information you could ever want.
Not subject to as much subjectivity. Drawback is that it may not be realtime up to date, but should be good enough.
Locals' informal guidelines to stay out of an area where you "don't belong" after dark may be so widely heeded that the number of assaults/robberies is low, but the probability of being mugged or beaten is still high.
I've seen 9 square mile cities of nothing but white trash and 1 sq mile cities that would give even the worst parts Compton or Camden a run for it's money (and actually is recognized by people in the hood of Compton - I lived in a different part of LA, check out central falls, RI or west warwick, RI).
And no crime maps are not population density maps, either.
A lot of you obviously haven't lived that many places.
And I don't know why the heck I'm defending this but wow some ignorant lack of intelligence on the hacker news boards - sorta disappoints me.
There's a dot over my neighborhood in Manhattan, just south of Washington Square. It's red, and says "Park Slope."
Feedback: You should show high-crime areas in NY, SF, or LA rather than Moody, AL
Even if you were to ignore the many problems with the very premise of this site (the racially and historically charged name first and foremost) the lack of granularity or verification in reporting would prevent any useful data from being gathered anyway. As other people have said, if you want to know if an area is high risk for crime, you have crime maps, if you want to know what the property values are, you have zillow, if you want to know what the median income of residents is, there's probably a map for that too.
By the crime maps, your probability of being robbed at Garfield-Red in the middle of the night is less than that of being struck by lightning in your lifetime. No Hyde Park resident will tell you it's a good or even reasonable idea to be anywhere near it at 11pm. When challenged on the data, they'll argue that few people are dumb enough to ride it at that hour, and that those who do get mugged are unlikely to bother with a police report for a crime which is seen as their own fault and unlikely to ever be solved (or even cared about) by CPD.