Is your community healthy or unhealthy?  How to tell

It’s amazing what a difference there is between a healthy, safer community compared to an unhealthy community.  We examined data across multiple cities and areas in Western Canada over several months. 

Unhealthy Community – 74% failure rate

In unhealthy communities, people warn one another before crimes half as frequently as in healthy communities. 

If people in unhealthy communities do send warnings about something suspicious it normally is over 12 hours after they saw it. These alerts almost never have video or pictures, just an unproven claim.  

All this adds up to really poor results. Crime victims in these communities suffer from a 74% failure rate! In an unhealthy community people rarely get involved in alerting others, but wait until they need something. Clearly, the lack of care before a crime happens, is a leading indicator of how many people are going to suffer when criminals do strike.

Healthy Community – 80-86% success rate

Healthy communities create as many or more warnings for their neighbours sake as they report actual crimes. These alerts average under 1 hour from the event and they usually include proof like video or images. With this extra effort, more people get involved.  With more people confirming what they saw the police are prone to get involved faster.

In a healthy community, thefts have an 80-86% success rate, when the victims report within the hour. 

In these communities the average time to report a theft is 12 hours after the crime versus 24 hours in unhealthy communities. This difference helps victims in a healthy community get a good result 56% of the time. Timely reporting is so powerful. This all adds up to a lot more people who can sleep well at night.

Broken court system

The arrest and conviction rate for criminals who break the law in healthy communities is far higher. They are arrested with more evidence and less work. Even the bigger critics of the court system would have to step back and say ‘Sometimes it does work!’ when they see what can happen in healthy communities.

The next time you see a post, a text, or an alert look how late it is. Look at how much care someone has taken to communicate facts.  If what you see is healthy we'd recommend giving all the help you can.  The results in healthy communities are amazing.

Locations we found as healthy

These 3 cities and 9 counties were places where some of our biggest supporters encouraged the regular use of Lightcatch.  We took these locations and compared them to the alerts that were created outside of those areas.  

  The majority are at risk

Ensure your property can deal with intruders even while you are sleeping or away. After consulting professional security system installers, industry experts, and police advisors on what really works we found there was a way to setup security systems that was low cost yet extremely effective.  When we measured this advice across thousands of crimes the results were astounding. The way experts recommended to do things was 400-500% more effective.  Very few people put these secrets into practice.  We want to help change that.

Whether you want to use your existing security products, source and install the technology yourself, or have a professional deliver the whole package, it doesn’t change how well these 7 steps work.

Crime blocker

Building results

Creating a healthier community where people live safer and have less financial damage from crime takes about 6 months.  We’ve reproduced these results in urban and rural environments in several distinct geographies and can do the same where you live.  Recommend your civic leaders to get residents education, support, and feedback with our Ambassador program.

The Data - Healthy versus Unhealthy

Below is a summary table I built to help visualize the differences I was seeing in the raw data.  There are more differences below.  I tried to pick out the most meaningful points to show how much a difference a community of people can make to the results their police force gets.  

The theft related data is mostly built from a dataset of hundreds of alerts on Lightcatch between Nov 2020-March 2021.  The warning related data is built from the March 2021 alerts on Lightcatch.  

Any questions about the analysis, the data, or the process to derive the data I'll do my best to answer.  

Healthy Image Irishtown Nature Park Entrance by James Mann  https://www.flickr.com/photos/james_mann/