Crime in Palm Beach County: By Zip Code

What parts of Palm Beach County have the most crime? What parts have the least? We’ve got answers by zip code.
Measured by arrest counts vs. population, West Delray Beach’s zip code 33446 has the lowest crime rate in Palm Beach County. With 22,571 people and only 24 counts, the rate of arrest counts per population was the lowest in the county at just over one in a thousand.
Riviera Beach’s zip code 33404 was the worst, with 1034 arrest counts booked in a population of 26,634. That crime rate is nearly 40 times as high as in West Delray, and roughly quadruple the county average of one count per hundred residents.
West Boca News readers will be pleased to hear that four of our five zip codes were in the top 10 for lowest crime out of 51 zip codes in the county. And the #1 West Delray is probably our sixth zip code since we often hear from readers in Saturnia Isles, The Bridges, and Mizner Country Club.
Here’s the Top 25 in lowest crime rates (West Boca zips are in blue):

We’ve included zip code maps of the county at the bottom of the post.
Here’s the worst 26:

We previously wrote about the crime rate in West Boca, and arrest rates in all nine Boca Raton zip codes.
A couple of notes about the data are in order. First, this is for only a three-month period – the first three months of 2014. We hope to do this again covering a longer period and think that will be more accurate overall.
Second, we don’t have perfect data and we didn’t go through it as thoroughly as we’d like to. Some of the counts are for things like “Booked – Recommit” or “Fail to Appear” which are not really crimes in and of themselves. The number of counts is also imperfect. When we went through Boca Raton in our earlier articles, the counts per arrest number ranged from 1.6 to 2.1. We’ve seen cases where one person is arrested and charged with over 30 counts. And our population numbers are for 2011, which makes them somewhat out of date. Overall we think these issues are minor but could be significant for some zip codes.
Third, some of the zip codes we included are small, making the data a bit less reliable. Canal Point’s zip code 33438 was second-worst, but the population is only 354 so the numbers are statistically dubious. Similarly, West Boynton’s 33473 (the GL Homes Canyon developments) ranked #2 in lowest arrest rate, but the population for that zip code is less than 4000. This should be less of a problem when we do this for a longer period of time.
Fourth, the zip codes are for the address of the person arrested, not necessarily for the place where the crime was committed.
Fifth, some of the arrests in the data had the wrong zip codes. For example, zip code 33425 is listed as having 24 arrest counts, 33422 had 12 and 33416 has 10. These three zip codes all have zero population. Over 500 of the nearly 15,000 or so arrests are attributed to zip code 00000, and another large chunk are from 4-digit or 6-digit zip codes. And there are big groups from other counties, especially Broward and Miami-Dade. We also left out the Tequesta zip code because most of it is in Martin County. We reduced the data to 13,093 arrest counts in a population of over 1.3 million people in the county.