2 States Tie as the Safest of the 44 We Rank (2026)

1. FBI Crime Data Explorer, state summaries · 2025
2. CDC National Center for Health Statistics, homicide mortality by state, 2024 (the six unranked states)

How we got this. The Safety Score is The Honest Local’s own recipe. Each source ranks every place on its own from 0 to 100 and the score is the average, so a place has to do well on all of them to lead. The FBI publishes a violent crime rate and a property crime rate for every police department that reports and for every state, so we blend the two instead of leaning on violent crime alone. Safe ought to account for burglary and theft too, not just the rarer, more severe crimes. A city reads its own police department, the Los Angeles Police Department for Los Angeles, and a state reads the FBI's state summary, monthly rates per 100,000 people summed over the latest full calendar year. Each rate ranks every place against every other place of its kind and the average of the two ranks is the score that decides the list; the plain violent crime rate is what we show you. A department that skipped months of reporting, or filed numbers far below anything plausible for its state or its own count (Chicago, and Jackson, Mississippi, whose 2025 FBI file carries 26 of the 63 homicides its police department investigated), reads grey rather than borrowing the state's rate. A state is ranked only when the FBI's file covers at least 90% of its residents (the US as a whole, 96%). Six fall short for 2025: Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, West Virginia, Indiana and South Dakota. A low rate there can mean missing reports, not less crime, so they sit under the list, unranked, with the CDC's homicide rate instead. It refreshes once a year, when the FBI publishes the prior year. For Maine, that means FBI Crime Data Explorer, Maine (state summary, monthly rates summed), FBI's own published state figure, not a city proxy.

Rankings by The Honest Local from public data, one page per list, refreshed on each source’s own cycle. Places with no reading are left out rather than estimated. Every value on this page carries its source in the page’s structured data.