The Crime Map crossed the bridge and arrived in Niterói. The new data on delinquency in the city is part of the new update of GLOBO’s interactive theft monitoring tool, available from this Monday on the newspaper’s website and accessible on computers, mobile phones and tablets. Now, the mapping – which helps to understand which neighborhoods are the most dangerous, where crime has increased the most and when driving is least safe – offers the reader information on 147 neighborhoods in the city of Rio and 51 others in Niteroi. In this new stage, the figures are based on microdata from the Institute of Public Security (ISP) until the first half of 2025, the most recent available.
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Launched last July as part of the newspaper’s centenary celebrations, the tool has also been enriched with additional filters, with new data visualization possibilities. In addition to separately viewing information on each of the four crimes recorded in the map – theft from passers-by, theft of mobile phones, theft of public transport and vehicles, crimes that more directly impact the routine of the population – the reader can also analyze criminal trends in the neighborhoods with two different periods: which includes only the first half of each year (from 2020 to 2025) or entire years (from 2020 to 2024). It is also possible to choose the mode of presentation of the data: in absolute numbers, in rate per hundred thousand inhabitants or in percentage change compared to the previous year.
Each option generates a map with a gradient of colors: the darkest, the neighborhoods with the most thefts, the highest rates or the greatest increases in delinquency; to lighter tones, which distinguish those with fewer occurrences, lower rates or percentage reduction of cases. There is also the possibility of browsing the data in the form of a ranking.
To dig deeper into a particular neighborhood, the reader can click on it on the map or search by name. In a new tab appears the historical series of crimes from 2020 to 2025, the variation of crime in the location compared to the previous year, a comparison with other neighborhoods and a heat map with the hours and days with the highest incidences of thefts.
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The crime map was created using microdata from more than 280,000 event records – 9,000 from Niterói and more than 270,000 relating to the capital – obtained through the ISP’s Access to Information Act. The organization, responsible for security statistics in the state, publishes monthly indicators divided by zones of PM battalions and police stations – which almost always cover several neighborhoods. Seeking to understand hyperlocal criminal dynamics, O GLOBO has repeatedly asked the agency for access to data such as coordinates or street names of incidents – all refused on the grounds that such information is confidential.
The smallest territorial units available by the FAI are therefore the neighborhoods, on which the Crime Map has placed a magnifying glass. This is the first time that criminal indicators in Niterói have been published with this level of detail.
With this data, O GLOBO used artificial intelligence to detect typos, then carried out checks to correct incorrectly filled fields in police reports, such as victims who mentioned Praça Saens Peña, instead of the Tijuca neighborhood, in the northern zone of Rio.
Ultimately, only in 5% of cases it was not possible to determine the neighborhood of the crime. Due to the low number of cases reported at police stations, some neighborhoods have been grouped together, such as Jardim Imbuí, in Niterói, which will be presented with Piratininga.
Unlike the ISP, which releases records based on the date the crime was reported to police, O GLOBO used the date of the incident as its basis. Thus, a theft occurring on December 31, 2023 and recorded only the next day will be recorded, in the tool, in 2023.
The period of occurrence of this Crime Map update is from 2020 to the first half of 2025. When the microdata for the second half of the year are available, they will be updated in the tool. Readers can also email their stories of violence to mapadocrime@oglobo.com.br.
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