TexasCHLforum.com

Jim Beaux wrote:In my travels Ive found a few "tells" that are common in sketchy neighborhoods - Malt liquor signs, burglar bars, graffiti, bail bond & "food stamp accepted here" signs.

Here are a few more:

Idle folks hanging in groups on the street
Homeless people dragging garbage bags and picking up cans
Scantily clad women standing in provocative poses on street corners
Bullet resistant cages around convenience store clerk stations
If the window is open during the day, it gets much sketchier at night
If it's closed all the time, it's sketchy all the time
Young men glaring at you for doing nothing but walking or driving by

A Washington D.C. news crew visited an area neighborhood identified as "sketchy" by SketchFactor, a new application that is designed to help people avoid troubled neighborhoods by accumulating crowdsourced data and data from public databases. Their goal was to prove it wasn't really a bad neighborhood at all.

That's not quite what they ended up proving. This article tells the tale.

The Huffington Post doesn't like the app at all (which may constitute a reverse recommendation of sorts) but the news crew's experience suggests that the app may be more credible than its wishful thinking critics would like folks to believe.