Press & data
We maintain two datasets that reporters use: a city-level US crime index with neighborhood breakdowns, and research on how private security licensing differs state by state. Both are free to cite, and we'll pull custom cuts on request.
What we can give you
- A single metro, broken out by neighborhood. We hold neighborhood-level crime data for 28 cities, built from those cities' own open-data portals. National aggregators generally stop at the city line — this is the cut most local stories actually need.
- Multi-year direction, not a snapshot. Every city carries a rate series, so we can say which places improved and which didn't. See the trends ranking.
- Security licensing, all 50 states + DC. Who regulates guards, required training hours, armed credentials, statutory penalties for operating unlicensed — and the 10 jurisdictions with no statewide licensing of security guards at all. Each record cites the regulator, statute or administrative code it came from.
- Custom pulls. Tell us the geography and the question; we'll send a CSV and explain the caveats.
Figures you can cite today
| Cities in the crime index | 759 |
| States and territories covered | 51 |
| Cities with neighborhood-level breakdowns | 28 |
| Jurisdictions with licensing research published (all 50 states + DC) | 51 |
| Of those, jurisdictions with NO statewide licensing of security guards | 10 |
Crime figures are for data year 2025, sourced from FBI Crime Data Explorer (Summarized UCR/NIBRS) + U.S. Census ACS 5-year. Licensing coverage is complete for all 50 states and DC, each verified against that jurisdiction's own regulator, statute or administrative code. Where a specific figure could not be confirmed on a primary source — several state legislature sites block automated retrieval — the field is omitted rather than estimated, so an absent value means "not verified", never "none".
Using our data
The crime index is published under CC BY 4.0 — republish it, chart it, build on it, including commercially. We ask only for credit:
HireSecurityNow.com US Crime Index — https://www.hiresecuritynow.com/crime-rate/methodology
Underlying incident counts are public record from FBI Crime Data Explorer (Summarized UCR/NIBRS) + U.S. Census ACS 5-year. The index, the A–F grading and the trend series are our derived work — that's the part worth attributing.
How we built it, and where it's weak
We publish the method and the limitations rather than just the numbers. The methodology page covers the violent/property weighting, why homicide anchors the score, the A–F bands, and the "dark figure" problem — that reported crime is not all crime, and under-reporting varies by offense and by city.
Two limits worth knowing before you write: agency reporting coverage varies, so we flag thin rows rather than silently ranking them; and small-population cities produce wild percentage swings, which is why our own trend ranking applies a population floor.
Who we are
HireSecurityNow is a directory of licensed private security companies in the United States. We publish this research because deciding whether you need security — and who is legally allowed to provide it — depends on facts that are scattered across 50 state regulators and hundreds of police agencies. More on the about page.