Score
Safety
Composite safety score from violent, property, and homicide crime rates using FBI-derived city data with state fallback.
Higher values rank better for this score.
How It's Calculated
The latest published score is normalized to a 0-100 scale. The method below explains what the score rewards, with technical source metadata available for audit.
How the ranking is built
Safety combines violent, property, and homicide risk into one score where lower estimated rates score higher.
- 1
City records are matched by normalized city and state name
- 2
unmatched places use state fallback rates.
- 3
City rates are strongly shrunk toward the state rate using prior populations to reduce volatility in smaller places.
- 4
The final composite is 55% low violent crime, 30% low property crime, and 15% low homicide risk.
Technical details
Read from the current master score table for this criterion.
The top 10 below ignore your blended relocation weights and sort only by Safety.
What This Score Means
Safety combines violent, property, and homicide risk into one score where lower estimated rates score higher.
Statistics Feeding This Score
- Violent crime rateSource: OpenCrime processed FBI Crime Data Explorer data
Estimated violent crimes per 100,000 people.
- Property crime rateSource: OpenCrime processed FBI Crime Data Explorer data
Estimated property crimes per 100,000 people.
- Homicide or murder rateSource: OpenCrime processed FBI Crime Data Explorer data
Estimated homicide or murder incidents per 100,000 people.
- Match level and confidenceSource: OpenCrime processed FBI Crime Data Explorer data
Whether the score used a city match or state fallback, plus match confidence.
Source Data
Known Limits
- Crime data is reported by law enforcement agencies, not Census places, so place matching is approximate.
- Unmatched places use state fallback rates, and city rates are shrunk toward the state rate to reduce small-population noise.
- Rape-risk estimates use OpenCrime violent-crime composition where available and state or national city-composition fallback otherwise.
- Sexual-violence reporting is especially incomplete and sensitive to reporting practices, so compare this score cautiously.
- Reporting gaps, agency participation, and definition changes can affect comparisons.
Top 10 Locations
Ranked by Safety.