From the Washington Examiner:
Two major real estate search engines nix crime data in racial equity push
DECEMBER 14, 2021 01:27 PM
BY ZACHARY HALASCHAKRealtor.com has removed crime data from its website, and Redfin has decided not to add it out of concerns that it could perpetuate racial inequity.
David Doctorow, the CEO of Realtor.com, said … the removal was part of a company effort to “level the playing field” and scrutinize what safety means to buyers and renters so that it can “reimagine how we integrate safety data” on the platform.
When firms use the word “reimagine” they’re usually up to no good.
…On the same day that Realtor.com announced that it was removing its crime data, Redfin came out with a full-throated denunciation of crime data being included on real estate websites. Redfin’s chief growth officer Christian Taubman announced that, after consideration, the company would not be adding crime data to its own platform.
Taubman said that Redfin had been weighing whether to add information about crime because one of the metrics that consumers consider when looking for a home to purchase is how safe the area around that home is. The company concluded that available crime data doesn’t accurately answer that question, and “given the long history of redlining and racist housing covenants in the United States there’s too great a risk of this inaccuracy reinforcing racial bias.”
For reasons.
Redfin highlighted the difference between crime and safety and said that through its research, which included surveys, people defined safety in a variety of ways. Taubman said that the available data, namely the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI, pertains to reported crimes and excludes information about crimes that go unreported and crimes that go unsolved.
As we all know from all the dead bodies in shallow graves that suburban gardeners are constantly digging up in Calabasas, Lake Forest, and San Mateo, there’s a huge amount of unreported murder in the suburbs, or something.
He said that data at a neighborhood level could lead to high inaccuracy.
“The fact that most crimes are missing creates a real possibility that the crimes that show up in the data set skew one way or another,” Taubman wrote. “And the fact that most reported crimes go unsolved means that some of the crimes being reported in fact may not be crimes.”
“Snitches get stitches” is what they say in the mean cul-de-sacs of Chevy Chase, Lexington, and Scarsdale.
In addition to the FBI’s metrics, Redfin also considered the National Crime Victimization Survey, which relies on interviews from tens of thousands of people annually and queries them about the frequency, characteristics, and consequences of criminal victimization across the country. Those who say they are victims of crime are also asked whether the crime was reported to law enforcement.
Taubman said that while the survey includes information on unreported crimes, because it is a survey, if respondents’ responses are racially biased, that bias would be reflected in the crime data.
“And there are troubling signs of this: in the 2019 survey, people reporting crimes were more likely to describe their offender as young, male, and Black than would be expected given the representation of those groups in the population,” he said.
This CGO’s PR department thought people would nod their heads in agreement when he said that.
Unfortunately, they’re probably right.
