What the Government Already Knows About Your Address

There is a file on your address. Not one file. Several. They exist in separate federal databases, maintained by separate agencies, updated on separate schedules. They contain every reported crime within a mile of your front door, every fatal car crash on every nearby road going back to 1975, your property's designated flood zone, every toxic release facility within proximity, every registered sex offender within a defined radius — name, address, offense, tier classification. All of it is public record. None of it required a warrant. You were never notified it existed.

The problem has never been that the data does not exist. The problem is that no one handed it to you in one place.

The Databases. What Is in Each One.

The Floor Problem

All of the above represents what was reported, what was logged, and what survived the documentation process intact. It is not the full picture. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, 52 percent of all violent crimes in the United States go unreported to police. The FBI's Crime Data Explorer — the most comprehensive public crime database in existence — is built entirely on reported crimes. It documents, at most, 48 percent of what actually occurred.

This applies to the crime data only. The FARS crash data is close to complete — fatal crashes require a police response and are almost universally documented. NOAA weather events are instrumentally recorded. EPA toxic release reports are legally mandated filings. The flood hazard data has known gaps, as the First Street Foundation analysis demonstrates, but it is not subject to a voluntary reporting problem in the same way crime data is.

The upshot: for environmental, weather, and infrastructure risk, the federal databases are a reasonable representation of reality. For crime, they are a lower bound.

SAMHSA Treatment Facility Density

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration maintains a public database of every licensed substance use treatment facility in the United States. Address, capacity, treatment modality, funding type — all public. The database was built for healthcare planning. Its secondary implication — that facility density in a given area correlates with the intensity of drug activity in the surrounding geography — is not a conclusion SAMHSA draws. It is a conclusion the data supports. The information is there regardless of what label it carries.

The Complete Federal Picture, by Database

What Has Not Been Done

Every database listed above is publicly accessible. None of them talk to each other. None of them were designed to answer the question: what is the composite risk profile of this specific address. They were built for policy analysis, infrastructure planning, law enforcement reporting, and regulatory compliance. Assembling them into a single address-level profile requires pulling from seven separate systems, normalizing geospatial data across incompatible formats, reconciling different update cadences, and presenting the result in a form that is usable by someone who is not a federal data analyst.

That is the only thing SafeScore does. The underlying data is federal, primary, and public. The work is the assembly. The output is what exists in those databases — rendered for a single address, without smoothing, without aggregation to the zip code level, without the layer of reassurance that neighborhood safety apps add because their business model depends on people not being unsettled.

The data on your address has always existed. You were just never given access to all of it in the same place.

Related: Your Neighborhood Is Lying to You →  |  See the Sit Rep →