Where Students Walk Matters: A Place-Based Typology of Crime Exposure on School Routes

School safety research often centers on incidents inside school buildings, yet students encounter risk along the routes they travel each day. Using 11 years of geocoded Chicago police data from 2005 to 2015, this study identified distinct crime exposure environments surrounding public schools through Gaussian mixture modeling applied to 581,537 street segment year observations across 13 offense categories. Eight exposure profiles emerged. The three lowest exposure environments comprised 94.3 percent of segment years, while two high-risk profiles, Violence–Narcotics Concentrated at 1.51 percent and Chronic Disorder Dominant at 0.52 percent, reflected persistently elevated corridors with overlapping offense types. Profiles differed primarily by offense composition rather than time of day, indicating that risk is structured by place. Longitudinal analyses showed 1,243 segments remained elevated for five or more years. Comparison with recent Safe Passage routes revealed substantial gaps in supervised coverage, underscoring the need for micro place, route-based prevention strategies.