s A New Way to Understand Crime Risk | CAP Index

See Your Scores in a New Light with Methodology Patterns

Get a clearer picture of the area surrounding your sites to help you understand whether risk is steady, rising, or falling in the area around your sites.

Methodology Patterns: A New Way to See Your CAP Scores

CRIMECAST now gives you a new way to understand and interpret your CAP Scores using all four CAP Methodologies (Max-1, Max-3, Max-6, and Max-12) – the Methodology Pattern. This enhancement helps you see not just the score for your site, but how crime risk changes as you move outward from that location.

This view highlights important patterns of change showing whether risk stays steady, rises, or falls in the area surrounding your sites to give you a deeper understanding of the environment surrounding your site.

What are the different categories?

The Methodology Pattern helps you see how crime risk behaves around your site. Each trend represents a different pattern of change across the four CAP Methodologies — from Stable to Sharp Increase to Volatile. Together, these categories reveal whether risk is steady, rising, falling, or fluctuating as you move farther out.

Below are a few examples to illustrate.

    Sample Methodology Patterns

    For the sharp increase pattern, there is a greater than 50% change in CAP score between 3 and 6 miles out (on the map, that’s to the northeast).
    For the moderate decrease pattern, there is between a 10% and 50% decline in score between 3 and 6 miles out (on the map, that’s everywhere except the northwest).
    For the stable pattern, scores remain within 10% of each other and are quite high.  On the map, the site is in a high-risk location (CAP score = 586 at 1 mile) and picks up other high risk areas to the northeast, northwest, and south as the view moves out to 12 miles.

    How This Insight Helps You

    Knowing the score for one methodology is useful, but seeing all four paints a complete picture of the pattern of risk around your site. These patterns can reveal insights you might otherwise miss.

    • Look at the pattern of scores from Max-1 to Max-12:

      Are they steady, or do they sharply increase or decrease as you move farther out?

    • Compare sites with similar scores but different patterns:

      For example, two locations could both have a Max-1 score of 150 — but one might increase (150 → 175 → 300 → 450), while the other decreases (150 → 150 → 100 → 95).

    • Interpret what that means for operations:

      • At what distance do delivery drivers or employees begin entering higher-risk areas?
      • Are customers driving through unsafe neighborhoods that could affect business?
      • If a site has an elevated risk score, how far would it need to move to reach a safer area?

      These are the kinds of questions you can answer when you see the pattern of scores rather than a single number.

    Connecting the Dots with Premium Plus

    Methodology patterns require scores for all four methodologies, so they are exclusively available with Premium Plus reports. Additional benefits of a Premium Plus Report include:

    • Visualizing how risk changes across multiple geographic scales.
    • Comparing sites side-by-side to spot meaningful differences.
    • Prioritizing sites that may need additional attention based on expanding or contracting risk.

    If you’re currently using Basic or Premium reports, why not upgrade to Premium Plus to uncover the full pattern of change around your locations?

    See a Premium Plus Report