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The lowest-crime neighborhoods in US cities, ranked from police department records, with how neighborhood crime rates work and when a low number misleads.
Most neighborhoods in a large American city record far less violent crime than the city as a whole. A citywide rate is pulled up by a small number of high-crime areas, so the typical resident lives in a place safer than the headline figure suggests.
Our guides rank every neighborhood in each city by violent crime per resident, using the police department’s own incident records, and mark the areas with the lowest rates.
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Crime concentrates in a few places. About half of all recorded crime in a city happens on 2% to 6% of its street segments. The other side of that pattern is that most streets record little or no violent crime in a given year. Safe neighborhoods are mostly residential, with owner-occupied homes, steady populations and little late-night commercial traffic.
A neighborhood crime rate is the number of violent offenses in a year divided by the number of residents, multiplied by 1,000. The FBI counts four offenses as violent crime: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Property crime, such as theft and car break-ins, is counted separately and is far more common in busy shopping and nightlife districts, even ones with low violent crime.
A rate near zero does not always mean an area is quiet. College campuses are often patrolled by their own police, whose reports are missing from city data. Parks, industrial zones and airports have few residents, so a handful of incidents produces a high or unstable rate. Small neighborhoods swing from year to year for the same reason, which is why rankings work best with a population floor.
The neighborhoods with the lowest crime are usually quiet residential areas far from downtown. Visitors often prefer central districts with hotels, restaurants and transit, which have more theft but are well policed and busy at night. Families tend to weigh schools and parks alongside crime. A good neighborhood guide shows the crime rate next to what each area offers.
Physical changes to a street can lower crime. In a Philadelphia trial, cleaning and greening vacant lots cut gun violence by 29% around the treated lots in neighborhoods below the poverty line. In New York, adding street lighting to public housing developments reduced nighttime outdoor serious crime by at least 36%.
