Run Safe

Safety information is often disconnected from the moment a person chooses a route. Run Safe places live public police records directly inside the map, alongside directions and the location itself.

The product separates data from certainty. It shows freshness, coverage limits, raw records, and clear caveats so a rating is a decision aid, not a claim that a place is safe or unsafe. Every dot links to the unedited source record.

1. Download the zip and unzip it.
2. Open chrome://extensions (Chrome, Edge or Brave) and switch on Developer mode.
3. Click Load unpacked, pick the unzipped runsafe folder, then open Google Maps in a covered city.

It is not on the Chrome Web Store yet, which is why it installs this way. To update, download the new zip, unzip it over the old folder and click the reload arrow on the extension card.

1. Open Google Maps and go to one of the 18 covered cities. A blue Run Safe card appears at the top right.
2. Pick a period (yesterday to last year), a type (violent, property or all) and a time of day (any, daylight or after dark). The heatmap updates.
3. Read the area rating for the dashed circle in the middle of the map: how that spot ranks against the rest of the same city, with counts by crime type and when something last happened there.
4. Zoom in past level 16 and click a dot, or a row in the card, to see the incident details and a link to the original police record.
5. To rate a run, open Directions, set a start and end, and choose walking. Run Safe draws an approximate on-foot route colored green to red by nearby incidents and summarizes it.
6. Click Full heatmap and sources in the card for a large map with a city switcher, an hour-of-day chart, a CSV download and the data sources.

The toolbar icon shows or hides the overlay on Google Maps. Check the "data updated through" date on the card: each city publishes on its own schedule, so some are a few days behind. Ratings are a decision aid, not a guarantee of safety.

• New York
• Chicago
• Seattle
• Philadelphia
• Charlotte
• Baltimore
• Boston
• Raleigh
• Las Vegas
• Fort Worth
• Long Beach
• Detroit
• Denver
• Nashville
• Tucson
• Sacramento
• Columbus
• Rochester, NY

These are 17 of the 50 largest US cities plus Rochester, NY. Ratings only compare places within the same city, because each police department defines and counts crime differently. Suburbs are separate agencies and are not covered.

Checked and left out, on purpose. San Francisco: its public feed has only about 270 incidents a month, so it is incomplete and would mislead. Los Angeles: its locations are rounded to about 1 km, too coarse to rate a 200 m area.

Coming next. Oakland, California, and Tacoma, Washington.