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On a whole, Alabama is not one of the safest states in the United States, yet many of its individual communities score very highly on our Safety Index due to low crime rates and well-staffed police forces. The state’s top five safest cities prove to excellent places to live peacefully and raise a family without fear of violent incident or home invasion, let’s take a look at them here.

Cullman, a city of nearly 16,000 and county seat of Cullman County, is Alabama’s safest city. The city scores a 0.72 on the Safety Index due to its low crime rates and excellent police force. 

Following at #2 is Vestavia Hills, a lush, fast growing suburb of large city Birmingham. The city of 34,781 logged a mere 24 violent crimes in 2017.

Third on the list is Hoover, located in the same north-central region of Alabama as the first two entries in the ranking. With a population topping 85,000, Hoover is unusually large city to log such impressive crime statistics, yet the regional shopping and economic hub posted a very low violent crime rate of less than one incident per 1K in 2017.

Ranking #4 is Foley, a small city of just over 18,000 in Baldwin County. Foley owes its safety in part to a high ratio of over 5 law enforcement officers for each 1,000 residents.

Rounding out Alabama’s top five safest cities is Albertsville, a small city of 21,588 with a violent crime rate of just 1.02 per 1,000 residents.

Safest Cities in Alabama, 2019

RankCitySafety Index
1Cullman0.72
2Vestavia Hills0.69
3Hoover0.68
4Foley0.61
5Albertville0.52
6Northport0.5
7Helena0.45
8Daphne0.44
9Pleasant Grove0.43
10Athens0.39
11Eufaula0.05
12Irondale0
13Madison-0.02
14Oxford-0.12
15Auburn-0.13
16Tuscaloosa-0.19
17Decatur-0.2
18Florence-0.24
19Muscle Shoals-0.48
20Leeds-0.63
21Opelika-0.65
22Jasper-0.65
23Phenix City-0.67
24Dothan-0.74
25Jacksonville-0.93
26Scottsboro-1.13
27Troy-1.25
28Ozark-1.31
29Alexander City-1.76
30Prichard-2.85
31Bessemer-4.24
32Anniston-4.89

Methodology

We used the most recent FBI crime statistics to create state rankings. There were initially 7,430 cities in the data set. After filtering out the cities with populations of less than 10,000, 2,929 cities remained. We then calculated violent crime rates and property crime rates by dividing the crime numbers by the population to get rates per 1,000. We also calculated the ratio of law enforcement workers to per 1,000. These were weighted with -50% for the violent crime rate, -25% for the property crime rate, and +25% for the law enforcement rate. The resulting metric gave us a the safety index score. The higher this number more safe the city is.

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