After Vegas, Here's 100 Safest American Cities, Home Security Firm Says

Late Sunday night, Stephen Paddock perched on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, just across the street from a concert where Jason Aldean was performing, and — armed with nearly two dozen firearms— rained bullets down upon about 22,000 people. The mass shooting — the deadliest in modern U.S. history — left at least 59 people dead and more than 500 others hurt.

As Patch has previously reported, violent crime in the United States went up for the second consecutive year in 2016, rising 3.4 percent, the latest FBI crime data show. There were an estimated 17,250 murders last year — an 8.6 percent increase from 2015 — and an estimated 1.2 million violent crimes. The five-year trend shows an increase of 2.6 percent from 2012, and the 10-year trend shows a decrease in violent crimes of 12.3 percent from 2007.

Home security company SafeWise, which ranks the 100 safest cities in the country every year using the latest FBI data, reported that not a single city in Nevada made its 2017 list.

(For more updates on this story and free news alerts for your neighborhood, sign up for your local Middle Tennessee Patch morning newsletter.)

Oak Ridge ranked 2nd on the list behind Lewisboro, N.Y. No other Tennessee city ranked in the Top 100. Oak Ridge is located about 25 miles outside of Knoxville. Here are the reasons behind its ranking, according to SafeWise:

“The town’s almost 30,000 people support the Not In Our City campaign that encourages collaborative Neighborhood Watch groups, publishes monthly lists of the five most-improved properties and five that need the most work, and provides a place for the community to review new police initiatives and other safety news in the town. There’s no doubt these programs contribute to why the town reported only seven total crimes in 2015.”

New Jersey had the most cities on the list with 25, followed by Massachusetts with 15 and Pennsylvania with 12. To see the safest cities in your state, click here to get to the SafeWise home page and scroll down until you reach "Discover the Safest Cities By State." Then select your state.

"If you don’t see your city represented, it’s possible that they reported incomplete data to the [FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program] or did not report data at all," SafeWise said on its website. It also said:

"We determine an appropriate threshold for each state and only report on cities with populations above this number," SafeWise said. That number is based on the state’s whole population and the number of cities to be included in the list.

Then the data was narrowed down to the number of reported violent and property crimes and calculated the likelihood of these crimes occurring out of 1,000 people.

"If you don’t see your city represented, it’s possible that they reported incomplete data to the [FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program] or did not report data at all," SafeWise said on its website.

"With these reports, we have put ourselves into our reader’s shoes in order to understand what makes us all feel safe or unsafe in a city. We feel that these rankings help get to the heart of the issue: What are the chances of crime happening to you or your loved ones?” SafeWise said.

Image via Shutterstock