This Is America’s Safest City

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 26, 8:14AM EST

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This Is America’s Safest City — © Kirkikis / iStock via Getty Images

What makes a city safe? Lack of crime? Good hospitals and high hospitals per 100,000 people? Streets with low accident rates? Clean air? In the day and age, tough COVID-19 restrictions? Clearly, the answer is subjects based on people’s age, health, and individual anxieties about what is safe and what isn’t.

We decided to focus primarily on safety. Several organizations report crime levels and gun deaths. We turned to the FBI’s 2020 Uniform Crime Report to identify America’s safest cities Cities are ranked by the violent crime rate — specifically, the number of violent crimes reported for every 100,000 residents. Only cities with populations of 25,000 or more were considered.

No city we considered No city had a violent crime rate that exceeds 51 incidents per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, the national violent crime rate stands at 399 per 100,000 people. The largest share of these cities are located in Midwestern states, including eight in Illinois and another seven in Ohio.

Potential explanations for lower levels of violence in these places are varied, though one may be relative financial security, as low-income communities in the U.S. are disproportionately burdened by crime. One study found that individuals with family incomes of less than $15,000 annually are three times more likely to be victimized by crime than those with family incomes of $75,000 or more.

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The safest city in America is Glen Cove, New York. Here are the details:

> Violent crimes per 100k people: 11.0
> Number of violent crimes: 3 — the lowest of 1,287 cities
> Murders reported in 2020: 0 reported — the lowest of 1,287 cities (tied)
> Population within reporting jurisdiction: 27,186

Methodology: To determine the safest U.S. city, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed violent crime figures from the FBI’s 2020 Uniform Crime Report. Violent crime includes murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rаpe, robbery, and aggravated assault. The rate of violent crimes per 100,000 people was calculated using population data from the FBI.

We considered cities that have more than 25,000 people based on five-year estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey. Limited data were available in the 2020 UCR for areas in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, though areas in these states were not excluded from the analysis.

Additional information on the population within the jurisdictions reporting figures to the FBI are also from the 2020 FBI UCR. Poverty rates are five-year estimates from the 2019 ACS.

Click here to read America’s Safest Cities

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.