The NYPD newest crime statistics map, CompStat 2.0, was viewed about 75,000 times in its first week. 

If you zoom out on the map, New York City looks like one big blue dot of serious crimes, including rape, robbery and murder. Parks and beaches seem like the safest places in the city, but often it’s because the NYPD can't pinpoint crimes that occur in open areas.

Noah Veltman with the WNYC Data News Team says making crime statistics more visible is a good step, but that we should be careful how much we read into dots on a map.

“This is data that is designed for humans to look at but not work with," Veltman said.

“So you can look at this map and draw whatever conclusions you're going to draw from it but you can’t take it and say, alright, are there more crimes here because there are more people or are there more crimes for other reasons?”

A neighborhood in outer Queens with a couple dozen residents in single family homes and two grand larcenies this year looks half as bad as a neighborhood with thousands of residents in high rises and five grand larcenies.

“I just don't know that this tells you that much about whether your neighborhood is safe or unsafe,” Veltman said. “You need a lot more context.”

The NYPD boasts their map allows residents to see crime "in real time." But from an open data perspective, Veltman said it was more exciting when the NYPD began releasing more crime statistics in spreadsheet form last year.