If you have a choice in the matter you need to look for several things in a neighborhood before you buy.  Look for the following characteristics:

• More owners than renters.
• Short distance to fire, police and ambulance services.
• No graffiti in the nieghborhood.
• Neighborhoods that are up and coming in that they have young upwardly mobile residents.

Yeah, you might be saying, "Good luck with that one" and walk off muttering something about fools and simpletons.  For the most part you live where you live and there's not much you can do about that. 

So what can you do?  Easy.  Go out and get to know your neighbors.  In the days before TV, this would have been a given.  Families would talk to each other from across their backyard fence before the twilight of the evening.  I think I saw that in a play once.

You could go so far as to set up a Neighborhood Watch program with your local law enforcement, but that might entail more work than people are willing to do.  Next best would be informal agreements between you and some or all of your neighbors to keep an eye on things when you are out.  This would require reciprocity on your part, but it's to both your and your neighbor's benefit to help each other out.

Something else to consider is the exchange of keys.  Leaving a key hidden on the property is a bad idea, theives have seen it before and they know all the regular hiding places.  That way if someone, say a service technician goes to your home, your neighbor will be able to verify who they are and that they are supposed to be there.  This is especially important because some burglars masquerade as service personnel to pick which house to break into.  If your neighbor is really on the ball and has a security camera set up at the front door, you can get a picture of the technician which could prove useful in case of a burglary.

One thing to consider when moving into a new neighborhood or developing a new safety plan for your home is to check up on your neighbors. You never know what the person next to you has done in the past. It's a regrettable fact that state agencies don't always make the best decisions when discharging certain felons. It's not only the run of the mill criminals you have to worry about either, these days you have to be on the lookout for sexual predators.

The good news is that the Internet is a great tool to find out more about these people. Family Watchdog is a website where you can check the national registry of sexual offenders. Don't stop there though. I used to do background checks on prospective employees for a mental health facility and while the Family Watchdog didn't exist back then we did check the state registry, that's usually maintained by the state Highway Patrol and the various counties, usually maintained by the county Sheriff's Department. Missouri, for example maintains lists at the Highway Patrol website and various Sheriff's Department websites like Cape Girardeau, St. Charles or Jefferson County. Some counties will even add Google Maps to the offenders profile so you can see how far they live from you. In addition several counties also add more information to the profile like crimes, years served, etc.

Do yourself a favor and make sure those lists are being maintained. In my searches St. Louis county didn't have a site, neither did Cole county whose seat is in Jefferson City oddly enough. If your local department doesn't have one set up make sure they get one, it's required by law.

One thing I noticed when I did my background checks, and this is important, is that as you move from local to state the chance that the information was correct decreased. For example, if I did a check in Cape County and found someone, they might not show up on the Highway Patrol database or the information might be incorrect. In that case if you send a nice email to the friendly officers, they will correct the oversight. While the lists are useful, they are not foolproof.

Another thing you can do is check public records rather than use a background check service.. I'd advice this, not just for cost, but also so you can get used to the raw information and what it can tell you about a person. If you want to do a paid check, by all means do so, just supplement that with your own searches. Missouri, for example has Case.net, where you can look up everything from speeding tickets to orders of protection and criminal charges, if any.

One of the cooler sites I've seen recently is Crimereports.com.  This site collects all of the police crime reports that usually get reported in the newspaper, mashes it with Google Maps and allows you to search by types of crime, during what period and distance from your location.  Unfortuneatly not every department participates.  My hometown department doesn't, but Crime Reports offers a form letter you can send to your local department in order to induce them to participate.

This is really what Mayor Gulliani did in the 90's in New York to really clean up that town.  When he saw that criminals were moving from highly patrolled areas to new neighborhoods, he'd shift police so that the hoods couldn't get a foothold in the new areas.  This takes care of problems with crime shifting to new jusitictions or a place that was previously peaceful being inunndated with refugee criminals.

If your town or city doesn't participate, you can find the form letter here.  There is a fee ranging from $49-$199 depending on the population served by the department, but the value they get back in cooperation with the community is invaluable.  This site's implications are really remarkable.  For the first time we can get an eagle eye's view of where crime is happening, confront it as a community and take back our streets.