The Municipal Top 10: Ten safest cities in America
Upon 2019’s end, WalletHub released its annual list of the “Safest Cities in America.” The website compared more than 180 cities across 41 key indicators of safety to create it. These indicators are across
three key dimensions: 1) home and community safety, 2) natural disaster risk and 3) financial safety.
WalletHub used a wealth of data from several organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Parents of Megan’s Law, The Pew Charitable Trusts, etc., to determine indicators from the number of assaults per capita, number of mass shootings
and hate crimes per capita to unemployment rates, foreclosure rates and median credit scores.
Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with WalletHub then determining “each city’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample.” The sample size included the 150 most populated U.S. cities, plus at least two of the most populated cities in each state.
Those cracking the top 10 are the following cities:
- Columbia, Maryland – 85.33
- Yonkers, New York – 84.80
- Plano, Texas – 83.54
- Gilbert, Arizona – 83.44
- South Burlington, Vermont – 83.33
- Virginia Beach, Virginia – 83.22
- Bismarck, North Dakota – 82.92
- Nashua, New Hampshire – 82.84
- Chandler, Arizona – 82.54
- Warwick, Rhode Island – 82.17