My guess is you could call or visit the police department and ask them about neighborhoods. They presumably have a better idea than even statistics would show.

The police department used to be able to tell statistics based on a street/block address. This was about 5 yrs ago - I am sure the service still exists, maybe it is online now.

I did use this service when I was in the Sunnyvale area. They gave me stats about how many times the police were called to a particular block ( I think they worked with the block address, rather than the particular street address ). They were able to tell me the type of incident that they were called for.

Chicagocrime.org is a neat web application that shows crime statistics on a map for Chicago is found at http://www.chicagocrime.org. Maybe you could get one of these "mashups" started around here.

I'm working on a mash-up like this. It's too early to show anything to you now, but I hope to have something available within the next few weeks.