Indianapolis is smack dab in the middle of Indiana, which is a conservative state. Therefore, conservative talk radio is abundant. One of my guilty pleasures is conservative talk radio. I can’t count the number of times my father had Rush Limbaugh on in the car. The radioman was an additional, parasocial crazy uncle. I have always had some form of conservative media in my life. Hearing old men gasp at the latest liberal cultural transgression makes me feel nostologic & at home.
If you were to take these guys1 seriously, you’d think Indianapolis was a war zone. It is true that Indianapolis has a lot of violence, so their warnings are not totally without merit. But when I hear them talk about the violence in Indianapolis, I think of downtown.
I’ve lived in downtown Indianapolis for three years. I have never felt in danger. So, what gives? Maybe it’s that I am a large dude (I’ve lost some weight since my playing days I swear). My wife does feel uncomfortable “near the circle”. I’ve heard her mother, an Irvington resident, say similar things.
Is downtown actually dangerous?
I am going to only consider Violent Crime, which in this dataset falls into one of these Categories: Homicide, Robbery, Assault, or Sexual Offense.
IMPD releases crime data with coordinates. This is the 2021 UCR data. Let’s check it out.
Marion County
Here is a table of the violent crime for all of Marion County.
Here is a cluster map of the individual crimes from Marion County. You can zoom in to find more info.
How to define downtown?
When Hoosiers say downtown, I’d be willing to bet they mean somewhere close to the circle. I doubt most would consider Holy Cross, a neighbor just east of our boundary, downtown.
I am going to define downtown using US Census Tracts, which provide a nice boundary and population data. So, I will consider crimes that happen within this boundary as downtown crimes.
There were a total of 430 violent crimes downtown last year.
Downtown Indianapolis: Census Tracts
What’s the population of downtown?
According to the Census, the population of downtown is ~20,000 people. For our purposes, is this supposed to represent the number of people downtown all year? I have roughly a years worth of data, from January to January (2023 to 2024). Were there 20 thousand people in downtown Indianapolis throughout the year? That can’t be right. On a Saturday during the summer I bet nearly 20,000 extra people are downtown.
According to Placer.ai, a website which estimates monthly visits to various locations, there are about ~300,000 monthly visits to zip code 46204, which contains much of downtown including the circle. Does that mean there were 300K x 12 (months) people downtown over the year?
Gainsbridge Fieldhouse hosts 2 million guests per year. How should we count this influx of people?
Finally, the VisitIndy people say there are 30 million annual visitors to Indianapolis.
This is genuinely confusing, and I am not sure how to resolve it. If anyone has a good idea please let me know.
The question I want to answer is:
How likely are you to be near or victim of a crime when visiting downtown?
To answer this, I need the number of crimes per day divided by the number of people downtown per day.
If I take VisitIndy’s estimate at face value, that would mean on average there are 30,000,000 / 365 = ~82,000 people downtown. This seems way to high. The standard deviation, due to sports matches, holidays, and various events, is probably large. I’d be willing to bet the average is closer to 40,000 to 50,000 people who come to downtown each day. So, I’ll split that range and call it 45,000. This will be my number of people in downtown Indianapolis each day.
How many crimes per day?
There are a total of 430 violent crimes downtown in the year. That is 1.17 violent crimes per day.
How many crimes per meter2?
The total area downtown is about 10 million meters2. A single square meter is about 10 square feet. There are 1.17 crimes downtown per day divided by 10 million meters2. That is equal to 0.0000001 crimes per day per meter2.
Or, put another way, for any given ~3x32 foot spot downtown you have a 1 in 10 million chance of being in the same spot as a violent crime.
downtown_area <-sum(downtown$area) # there are 0.000000119 crimes per day per meter downtown# I like those oddscrimes_per_day_per_meter2 <- (crime_per_day / downtown_area)crimes_per_day_per_meter2
1.194498e-07 [1/m^2]
What is the crime per 100 people?
Back to population, there are ~0.002 violent crimes per day per 100 people downtown.
# for every 100 people downtown, there are 0.002 violent crimes(crime_per_day / downtown_pop)*100
[1] 0.00261796
Is there more crime in the Circle?
My conservative uncles, and my beloved mother-in-law, may have the right intuition when it comes to the circle. The crime in the circle is higher than the rest of downtown.
Instead of 0.0000001 crimes per day per meter2, there are 0.0000006 crimes per day per meter2. The latter number is higher than the former. Is the difference significant? What do you think?
What if you visted downtown every day?
If you lived for 80 years & visted downtown once every day, that would be roughly 29,200 visits.
After your entire life, you would have had a 0.3% chance of being in the same spot as a violent crime
years <-80total_visits <- years*365odds <- (total_visits * crimes_per_day_per_meter2)odds