Though New York City has considerably low crime for a city its size, and experienced another drop in overall crime in the past year (except in a few key categories such as homicides and robberies), the Big Apple is nowhere near the top of the list of New York State’s safest cities. However, the top five safest cities in the state are all near NYC, located in the wealthy counties of Westchester and Nassau.
New York’s safest community is Bedford, an affluent town of 18,000 in Westchester County. Bedford recorded just 4 violent crimes in 2018, resulting in a violent crime rate of 0.22 offenses per 1,000.
#2 Floral Park lies just outside the border of the Queens Borough of New York City in Nassau County, Long Island. The village is a peaceful and safe place to live, logging 2018 crime rates a mere fraction of national levels.
The 3rd safest city in New York is New Castle, another idyllic Westchester County town with wide lawns and historic 18th Century homes. With just one reported violent crime in 2018 and a property crime rate 13% of national levels, New Castle is a model community in terms of safety.
Long Beach (#4) is the 2nd Nassau County community in New York’s top 5. The beach community has a marginally higher rate of violent crime than other entries, perhaps due to its status as a popular tourist destination during the summer months, yet still achieved impressively low crime rates in 2018.
Violent crime is practically nonexistent in #5 Harrison: the wealthy Westchester County town logged 0 violent crimes in 2018. Harrison is kept out of the top spot solely due to its slightly higher property crime rate of 3.51 per 1,00, which is still less than 20% of the nationwide average.
New York’s Safest Cities
Methodology
To identify the safest cities, we reviewed the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics. We eliminated any cities that failed to submit a complete crime report to the FBI and cities with populations under 10,000. This left 3,381 cities (out of a total of 9,251).
There are two broad classifications of crimes: violent crimes and non-violent crimes. According to the FBI, “Violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses that involve force or threat of force. Property crime includes the offenses of burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. The object of the theft-type offenses is the taking of money or property, but there is no force or threat of force against the victims. ”
We computed the total number of crimes reported by each city by adding violent crimes and property crimes. We then created a crime rate as the number of crimes per 1,000 population. Then we transformed the total crime rate variable so that the skewness was reduced and normalized.
Data from 2,831 law enforcement agencies was then collected to determine police adequacy (TotalCrimes / Number of police employees). We consider that the smaller the police adequacy statistic is, the safer the city is. This variable was also transformed and normalized.
Finally, the two variables were combined to create a safety score for each city.
