In a previous posting, we analyzed citywide crime trends in Atlanta. But crime is of course not uniformly distributed throughout the city, and so it is worth taking a deeper dive to investigate the spatial patterns by Neighborhood Planning Unit. This analysis does that, again utilizing the COBRA data available for public download from the Atlanta Police Department.

Atlanta’s 25 Neighborhood Planning Units (shown below) are identified by letters A-Z (note: there is no NPU U). The “alphabet” starts in the northwest corner (far left of the map below), and culminates with NPU Z in the southeasternmost section of the city.

Property crime rates are shown below. They declined in every NPU over the period 2009-2021, though the decrease was least dramatic in NPUs A, B, and C—the three northernmost NPUs—where the crime rates were already low in 2009 (and remain low in 2021).

Violent crime rates are similarly down in nearly every NPU, from 2009-2021. The exceptions are NPUs A, B, and, Q which started low and remained essentially flat over the period. As with property crime, the overall violent crime rates are lowest in the northern NPUs (A through F). The steepest declines in violent crime rates were in NPUs in the center of the city, e.g. NPUs K and L. These were two of the NPUs with the highest rates of violent crime at the 2009 start of the analysis period.

Given the findings about homicide in our previous citywide post, it should be no surprise that the trends at the NPU level are more mixed. First, there is a lot more volatility year-to-year than with other types of crime. And while some NPUs like L and G enjoyed downward trends from 2009 to 2021, other NPUs like J and S moved in the opposite direction. And several NPUs such as S show upticks in the most recent years. In some of these cases, such as in NPU B, the magnitude of this uptick is small in absolute terms (since the northern NPUs have low rates overall), but large on a percentage basis.

Want to explore further on your own? We have prepared a visualization that permits examination of crime rates over time by NPU and by type (click on image to access):