More than most Brooklyn neighborhoods, the area covered by the 70th Precinct has a little bit of everything, from the streets of Flatbush , home to many Caribbean immigrants, to the tree-lined medians and sprawling Victorian mansions of Ditmas Park, which boasts a culinary hotspot on Cortelyou Road. Found right smack in the middle of the borough, it also includes the middle-class apartment houses of Midwood, home to a large Orthodox Jewish population, and Brooklyn College. The neighborhood borders Kensington, to the west, and attracts just as many newcomers, but it isn't nearly as safe, as the 70th Precinct includes a sliver of Flatbush to the east.

This diverse neighborhood came in 30th out of the 69 neighborhoods for per capita crime in DNAinfo.com's Crime & Safety Report, with 123 major crimes per 10,000 residents. Like the rest of the city, the neighborhood is much safer than it once was. Crime was down 80 percent in the 70th Precinct from 1993 to 2010, with robberies dropping 82 percent and burglaries falling by 89 percent. Testifying to the newfound calm, the precinct commander boasted that his cops didn't fire their guns once in 2010.

Still, though overall crime dropped 5 percent in 2010, violent crimes jumped, with reported rapes in the 70th rocketing 118 percent, from 11 in 2009 to 24. Robberies rose by 5 percent and felony assaults by 7 percent. Narcotics busts, up 18 percent last year to 547, were one of the few crimes whose rate rose (18 percent) over the period from 1993 to 2010.