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Q: I am relocating soon and am considering buying a condo in Alexandria, Va. It seems like a lovely old place.
But when I checked the crime statistics on a few websites, it shows that violent crime is above the statewide average. Now I am uncertain. Should I look elsewhere? (Bing: Find crime stats for your area)
— Boston
A: On the surface, statistics such as the percentage of population affected by crime seem simple and straightforward. On a state level, they're meaningful because the population and the number of crimes counted are large.
But on a local level, crime statistics can be misleading, particularly when they're presented without any context.
For instance, if a man murders his family and then commits suicide, statistically, a town or neighborhood could look like a hot spot of bloodshed — even if the event was an anomaly and stranger-on-stranger street violence is rare.
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The picture becomes even more muddied when a place has a mix of income levels, housing styles and ages, and commercial uses.
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I'm familiar with Alexandria, and I can vouch for its diversity in all of these measures because it's been a lively port town for centuries. The city has upscale 18th- and 19th-century town houses, faded tract houses, crumbling housing projects, gourmet restaurants, cheap delis, fancy boutiques, featureless warehouses and even a wartime torpedo factory that has become a giant warren of art studios.
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The jumble is part of Alexandria's charm, but that doesn't mean that each of its neighborhoods is equally safe.
So you'll need to get a better sense of what's happening in the neighborhood where you want to live. One relatively new tool that I like is the Local Info section of Trulia.com. The real-estate website has created a crime map for every jurisdiction in the country. It shows violent and nonviolent recent crimes, and you can zoom in to the street level to get a brief description of what happened and when.
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Even within the same city, crime rates differ. For instance, in recent months, a number of crimes — including assault, robbery and burglary — have occurred in the historic, expensive enclave of shops and town houses in Alexandria known as Old Town. But few have occurred in the middle-class, suburban neighborhoods near another Alexandria tourist magnet, George Washington's Mount Vernon.
But don't confine yourself to online stat searches. Before you buy, comb through local newspapers for crime reports and stories that point to security or lighting deficiencies in the condo complex you like. These can include a rash of car thefts or purse snatchings. Visit the complex during the day and night. Talk to the neighbors and observe the daily goings-on.
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And above all, trust your "spider sense" to pick up subtle clues that your conscious mind may have overlooked. If a place just feels unsafe, heed your instincts and skip it.
