How we assess city safety
Latam Crime Map consolidates every major travel-safety source for Latin America — government advisories, official crime data, crime indices, and traveller reports — into one consistent, incident-based read per city and neighbourhood. It rates places by reported events and conditions, never by who lives there.
What "consolidated" means
Each city is assessed by merging these source classes and reconciling them — where sources agree and where they conflict, both are stated:
- Official government advisories — US State Department travel advisory level, US OSAC crime reports, UK FCDO advice per country.
- Official crime data — published police and ministerial statistics where available: SSP-SP (São Paulo), ISP-RJ (Rio), SISC (Medellín), Mapa del Delito (Buenos Aires), FGJ-CDMX (Mexico City), and others.
- Crime indices — Numbeo's crime/safety index as a comparative data point (attributed, not reproduced).
- Traveller communities — recurring practical patterns from Reddit, Wikivoyage, and established forums, filtered through an events-not-feelings discipline.
- Editorial safety maps — peer-reviewed models such as Vanguard Attaché where they cover a city at district level.
The honesty rule
We never fabricate per-neighbourhood ratings for a city we don't have verified data for. A city-level overall rating is honest; inventing district-level detail without sources is not. Pages without sufficient source data display a limited consolidated data notice and link directly to the primary sources instead of asserting a verdict we can't support.
Events, not feelings — never the people
Every claim describes incidents and conditions, not the people who live somewhere. Assessments like "high rates of phone snatching on commercial streets after dark" are allowed; demographic or socioeconomic characterisations of residents are not. This isn't just an ethical rule — it produces more accurate, actionable guidance and avoids the racial-profiling failure modes of earlier safety-map products.
Safety tiers
- Safe (1–2.5) — Generally lower risk; standard urban precautions sufficient.
- Moderate (2.5–5) — Reasonable vigilance warranted; specific conditions matter.
- Caution (5–7.5) — Heightened awareness recommended; area and time of day vary significantly.
- Avoid (7.5–10) — High-risk environment; major travel authorities advise extra precautions or reconsider travel.
Scores are on a 1–10 scale (1 = safest). For cities with a continuous model (e.g. São Paulo), district scores are sampled from a peer-reviewed risk surface. For cities with a tier model, districts share the city's overall rating unless a trustworthy source differentiates them.
Source standards
- Every published claim traces to a named, linked source.
- Sources are paraphrased and attributed — never reproduced verbatim.
- Dates and recency are tracked; pages show a last-updated date.
- A source is only used where we have an actual excerpt to verify — world-knowledge gaps are acknowledged, not filled with invention.
What this map is not
- Not a real-time crime feed — ratings are updated periodically, not live.
- Not a guarantee — consolidated guidance, based on reported incidents and cited sources, not a prediction of individual outcomes.
- Not comprehensive at neighbourhood level everywhere — many cities have a single overall rating; district detail is added only where verified sources exist.