Security plays a large part in deciding where one lives. People want to live in a city where they feel safe and secure.
Personal finance website WalletHub compared 182 cities across 35 key indicators of safety to see which can be considered the most safe in the country.
In order to rank the cities, WalletHub compared each one against three key dimensions:
- Home & Community Safety
- Financial Safety
- Natural Disaster Risk
Those dimensions were evaluated using 35 relevant metrics, each with their own weight (click here to see the corresponding weights for each dimension). Each metric was then graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest level of safety.
Each city’s weighted average across all metrics was then used to calculate its total score and the resulting scores to rank-order the cities. Only the city proper in each case was used, with cities in the surrounding metro area excluded.
Safest Cities in America
The top 10 safest cities in the country are as follows:
- Nashua, N.H.
- South Burlington, Vt.
- Warwick, R.I.
- Columbia, Md.
- Gilbert, Ariz.
- Fargo, N.D.
- Lewiston, Maine
- Plano, Texas
- Portland, Maine
- Brownsville, Texas
Not only is this information useful for people looking for a new city to live in, but security pros can look at the data to figure out where they can better allocate their marketing resources.
They can also look at the data to see what type of services they should offer in each city. For example, while one city may rank highly for home safety, it may also have a high risk of suffering from a natural disaster. This would tell you that residents of that city would be more interested in leak detectors and life-safety devices than surveillance cameras.
Make sure to check out a comparison of the best vs. worst cities when it comes to assaults, hate crimes, traffic fatalities and more in the slideshow above.
