The grey zone: measuring what never gets reported
Maya Chen
Lead Safety Researcher · May 20, 2026
The majority of unsafe moments never make it into any official record. No police report. No hospital visit. No statistic. Just a person who changed their route, stopped going out at night, or carried fear silently.
The data that doesn't exist
Safety research is built on reported incidents. But studies consistently show that fewer than 20% of threatening encounters are formally reported. The grey zone — those unreported moments — is where the real scale of the problem lives.
"If you only study what gets reported, you are studying the exception, not the rule."
— Maya Chen, Lead Safety Researcher
MyHives was designed to capture the grey zone. Not through surveillance, but through voluntary, anonymous signal-logging that lets people contribute without exposing themselves.
What we found in 90 days
In our first pilot cohort, users logged 6.3x more safety signals than the equivalent area recorded in official incident reports for the same period. The grey zone is larger than anyone modelled.
This data doesn't just inform our product. It's being shared — in anonymised, aggregated form — with urban safety researchers and local municipalities to reshape how cities think about safety infrastructure.