When Mayor Frank Picozzi learned Warwick, Rhode Island, had topped a list of the safest cities in the United States, he wasn’t surprised.
The charming city on the coast took advantage of federal money handed out during the COVID-19 pandemic to bolster its fleet of fire trucks and police vehicles, part of a yearslong effort to help improve public safety, which Picozzi credits with helping the city rise through rankings.
“We had some areas of the city that were kind of rocky neighborhoods, but by constant policing and economic development, that’s not the case anymore,” Picozzi said. “People take pride in the city.”
The analysis published by WalletHub in October doesn’t just take into account crime data, which can be flawed and difficult to compare across cities. It also evaluates how safe residents are from natural disasters like tornadoes, wildfires and hurricanes. Financial safety is also measured by factors like the unemployment rate and the percentage of people living without health insurance and in poverty.
“Too many people don’t take this into account when assessing safety,” said WalletHub writer and analyst Chip Lupo.
But trying to determine where Americans are the safest isn’t an exact science. Amid efforts to find new ways to measure public safety, some experts warn that evaluating public and personal safety may require more nuance.
The top 10 safest cities in the United States, according to WalletHub, are:
The nation’s top 10 most dangerous cities (or the least safe of the 182 ranked), according to WalletHub, are:
Lupo said WalletHub evaluated the 150 most populous cities in the country and at least two of the most populous cities in each state on 41 weighted metrics related to safety. The cities were given a score out of 100. Factors related to home and community safety − including crime, traffic fatalities, the amount of law enforcement employees and the perception of safety − carried the most weight.
Though most cities in the top 10 rank highly across all three categories, some were still at high risk of extreme weather events or financial struggles. Overland Park, Kansas, and Yonkers, New York, for example, were ranked 118th for natural disaster risk and financial safety, respectively.
Crime rates are often used as the primary way to determine where exactly Americans are safest, but the data “is quite imperfect,” said Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice.
Comparing city to city doesn’t account for the fact that some neighborhoods have far more crime than others. And pitting cities with vastly different populations against one another can also be somewhat unfair, Gelb said, pointing out that the FBI even cautions against using its crime data to compare jurisdictions.
Though Memphis is often chided for having the worst crime rate in the country, for example, that title was actually held by Lakeside, Colorado, in 2024, according to data submitted to the FBI.
But Lakeside has an estimated population of just 16. Among the country’s 40 most populous cities, Memphis did have the highest crime rate overall.
Many in the criminal justice community are moving toward defining public safety by not just the absence of crime but the presence of health and well-being indicators, Gelb said.
On Dec. 18, advocacy organization Campaign Zero launched an interactive platform that compares data on “housing affordability, healthcare access, economic security, education access, carceral harm, and crime” in 11 major cities in an effort to redefine public safety and how it’s measured.
Local leaders have embarked on similar endeavors, including in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. Researchers interviewed young people and developed safety indicators, “such as playing outside and riding the train, and corresponding metrics that St. Paul can use to measure each indicator, such as the number of young people utilizing public spaces.” (St. Paul ranks 47th in WalletHub’s list of safest cities.)
Researchers from the University of California undertook a similar project, asking residents of Oakland, ranked 169th by WalletHub, how they know if their area is safe and developed nearly 600 “firsthand indicators” of community safety.
What safety metrics are taken into account when comparing localities can produce dramatically different results.
San Jose, California, ranked 84th by WalletHub, was found to be the country’s safest city in a recent study by SmartAsset. The company ranked 50 of the most populous cities based on variables including violent crime rate, property crime rate and vehicular mortality rate.
Meanwhile, U.S. News and World Report found Johns Creek, Georgia, was the safest place to live, based on the murder and property crime rates per 100,000 people reported to the FBI.
On the other end of the spectrum, Memphis, where the National Guard has been deployed in an effort to curb crime, was considered the country’s most dangerous city by all three rankings.
Chris Noeller, police chief of Pueblo, Colorado, pointed out that while his city was listed among the 10 most dangerous by U.S. News and World Report, it was absent from a similar list compiled by Newsweek, both of which are based on FBI data.
Though Noeller said he may not be “satisfied” with where crime is in Pueblo, he told the Pueblo Chieftain, part of the USA TODAY Network, that his department has done “a hell of a job” reducing it.
“I can name about 30 cities that nobody would want to be in right now that are much more dangerous than Pueblo,” Noeller said.
Gelb said lists like these can be a great way to motivate local officials to enact better public safety plans. Nobody, he said, wants to find themselves at the bottom.
“It’s absolutely vital for cities to gauge how they’re doing,” he said. “Even if the ranking isn’t a precise measurement of performance.”
But for people trying to make decisions about where to live, work and play, rankings of city-level data, especially when it comes to crime, aren’t granular enough to provide real insight, said Alec Brownlow, a professor at DePaul University who studies geographies of fear, safety and security in urban landscapes. “I think rankings are bogus,” he said.
Ultimately, no single analysis can capture all the potential threats to a person’s safety, Brownlow said.
“Because we’re all individuals and my perception of safety and my perception of the decisions I make around a gajillion different things on any given day are so distinct from everybody else, I think in the end it’s sort of fruitless.”
Contributing: Lucas Finton, Memphis Commercial Appeal; James Bartolo, Pueblo Chieftain