A recent study by MoneyGeek finds Arlington among the top-ranked for safest in the country. Arlington placed in the No. 13 spot on the personal finance technology company’s newly released Safest Large Cities list.
To calculate each city’s cost of crime and cost of crime per capita, MoneyGeek analyzed the most recent crime statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation combined with research on the economic cost of crime by type of crime to estimate the cost of crime in nearly 300 cities across the United States. The total societal cost of crime for these cities was estimated to be $203 billion in 2020, up from $176 billion in 2019.
Among the findings is that the average cost of crime in the U.S. is $1,734 per capita. The 20 safest cities have crime costs below $352 per capita, with the lowest crime cost in Naperville, Ill., at $187 per capita. St. Louis has the highest cost of crime, at $11,574 per capita. The cost of crime in Arlington was $1,303 on a per capita basis, according to the report.
Additionally the report found that the average city saw a 15% increase in the cost of crime from 2019 to 2020. The median increase in crime costs across the nearly 300 cities analyzed was 11%.
While perceptions of safety are vital, crime statistics do not capture any city or community’s whole story, MoneyGeek said.
“Behind all these averages that people like to cite about the crime rates in different communities are individual people and their decisions about how they choose to engage in their community,” says Jesse Bruhn, Annenberg assistant professor of education and economics at Brown University who researches education issues and inner-city gang violence. “There’s a lot more heterogeneity in these patterns that we just can’t measure.”
For more: moneygeek.com/living/safest-cities
