Crimes Against Society (CAS): Enhancing a New Layer of Risk Intelligence
In April 2026, CAP Index will not only launch our trusted crime risk scores but continue to enhance a powerful expansion to our national risk scoring platform: the Crimes Against Society (CAS) Index. For decades, CAP Index has helped organizations understand and mitigate risk through CAP scores, particularly focusing on overall, persons, and property crime risk. With the addition of CAS, clients gain a more nuanced lens into the underlying conditions shaping how individuals experience a location, factors that may also signal early-stage risk and precede more serious offending.
What Are Crimes Against Society?
Crimes Against Society are offenses that disrupt the quality of life, public order, and overall sense of safety within a community. While they may not always rise to the level of serious violent or property crimes, they are often highly visible and influential in shaping perception – and, importantly, can signal emerging risk.
The CAS Index incorporates four key categories:
- Drug Offenses – incidents involving the possession, distribution, or use of controlled substances.
- Trespassing – unauthorized entry onto land or property that may point to a lack of territorial control.
- Disorderly Conduct – behaviors that disturb public peace, including public intoxication, indecent behavior, and other disruptive activity.
- Loitering and Vagrancy – including offenses such as the presence of individuals in public spaces without a clear purpose or shelter (homelessness).
Together, these categories provide a more complete picture of the social environment surrounding a location.
Why CAS Matters for Decision Making
Traditional crime metrics remain essential, but they don’t always tell the full story. Many organizations need to understand not just where crime is occurring, but how safe a place feels and how conditions may be evolving over time. The CAS Index is designed to fill this gap. For many CAP Index clients, the Crimes Against Society scores deliver two critical advantages:
Better Understanding of Perceived Risk
CAS captures the street-level, day-to-day activity that shapes how customers, employees, and communities perceive safety. A location may not rank high in serious crime, yet elevated CAS activity (e.g., visible drug use or disorderly conduct) can significantly impact foot traffic, employee comfort, and brand reputation.
Early Warning Signals for Emerging Risk
CAS often acts as a leading indicator. Elevated levels of disorder or low-level offenses, like vagrancy, can precede increases in more serious crime. By identifying these patterns early, organizations can proactively allocate resources, adjust operations, or implement preventive measures before risks escalate.
Built on Deeper, Broader Data
Developing the CAS Index required a significant expansion of CAP Index’s already robust data infrastructure. Because Crimes Against Society are not always consistently reported across jurisdictions, our team of crime analysts and criminologists undertook an extensive effort to source, request, clean, and validate new datasets from across the country. This work has:
- Expanded geographic coverage across the United States
- Enhanced data depth and consistency for previously underrepresented offense types
- Strengthened overall modeling capabilities across CAP Index products
In addition, CAS incidents have been fully integrated into CAP Index’s Crime Incident Feature (CIF). Where available, clients can now view specific CAS-related incidents occurring around their locations, which provide valuable context alongside the scores.
A More Complete View of Risk
The introduction of the Crimes Against Society Index represents a meaningful step forward in how organizations understand and respond to risk. By combining traditional crime metrics with CAS insights, CAP Index clients can:
- Evaluate both actual and perceived risk
- Identify emerging hotspots before escalation
- Make more informed security, staffing, and operational decisions
- Gain deeper visibility into the conditions shaping their locations and the perception of risk around them
As we approach the April launch, we’re excited to bring this new level of intelligence to our clients, helping them stay ahead of risk, not just react to it.
Recent Posts
Why Prioritizing Branches by Risk is the Smartest Security Strategy
A Conversation with McDonald’s Director of Security Rob Holm
