Outside of the 4 (okay, 5) years I lived in Athens for School, I was always a Cincinnatian. As in “Skyline Chili runs in my veins, LaRosa’s Pizza membership, Team Fiona” kind of Cincinnatian.
When my wife moved to Cincinnati, I drew her a map of the city, highlighting different neighborhoods based on how safe it was to travel at night. It was totally biased, likely inaccurate, and the literal definition of anecdotal.
We just uprooted our family, leaving our 1/3-acre home in a well-off suburb for an acre lot north of Dayton. We’re entering our Stardew Valley arc. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about Dayton, and, even though my wife is from the area, she couldn’t draw me a map.
So I used a publicly available crime CSV file from here to figure out where I’m good to go grab that nightcap, versus areas I should avoid.
Scope
Pull in publicly available data, use Pandas to organize the DFs, look at the most recent complete dataset (2024), and create a matrix of crime types and Dayton Neighborhoods.
Methodology
- Ingest the dataset
- Filter it to only include 2024 data
- Create a top XX crimes list (I settled on top 10)
- Create a top XX neighborhood list (I settled on top 15)
- Use the above to make a Matrix
Results
See the image below for the findings. Overall, looks like I’m avoiding Old Dayton North, North Riverdale, and Westwood! I was particularly surprised by the high ratio of assaults versus the other crimes. This could be because more crimes are classified under Assault, where things like theft seem to be broken down more.
Notes
A couple more things to note – this lacks many analytical controls, for example, what’s the population of these neighborhoods? Foot traffic? It would be interesting to sort the matrix by population living in the area, or another desirability metric, to see how it compares; the biggest challenge being neighborhood classification. That’s for future projects, though!
Stay Curious!
Source
Annual Reported Crime Statistics. n.d. Retrieved January 14, 2026. https://dayton-transparency-portal-1-daytonohio.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/annual-reported-crime-statistics-1.
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