maleficent

Two O.C. cities ranked among 10 safest
Who's living in the safest cities? Do you agree? how about the unsafest cities? Does having this information make you want to move to or move away from any of these cities.

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fresnelly

I'd be curious to see the actual crime stats from both groups of cities. WIthout them It's hard to guage what "safe" is. How close and far apart are they?

Mal: Your link asks for a registration. Is there another source I can go to?

I know that crime happens in my city (Toronto), but I feel safe enough that I can walk through any neighbourhood at anytime. This is because I believe most crimes happen amongst those who know each other, and the odds are in my favour. Call me naive if you will, but I would never trade the bustle and diversity of my town for a gated community and a 1.5 hour commute.

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djtestudo

We're #6! We're #6!

Hey, in Baltimore you have to find SOMETHING to be proud of...

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maleficent

I posted the entire story... but if you go to google news.. and search on 10 safest cities... you'll get back a ton of links to this subject - this was the first story that listed the top ten in safest and unsafest cities.

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Charlatan

I'd also like to see other stats about those cities (population differences, income strata, etc.). I think it would be very telling.

I'd also like to know what is meant by "safe".


I too live in Toronto. I grew up in some of the roughest neighbourhoods in the city and yet never felt unsafe.

I don't live too far from Fresnelly and have the same take. There are few places that I wouldn't feel safe in this city.

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maleficent

For the top city on the list... Newton Mass - here are the stats...
http://newtonma.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm

Vs Baltimore
http://baltimore.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm

Those are population statistics... there are income statistics as well - that i'll get eventually..

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ratbastid

Cary, NC is #10 safest, and I can concur. Nothing too scary in that overgrown suburb and strip-mall factory. The joke around here is that CARY is an acronym: Containment Area for Retired Yankees.

Where's Salt Lake City, where I grew up? That's one SAFE town.

raincity

I'm surprised some of those north jersey cities like Patterson and East Orange didn't make the dangerous list. Those are the places that give NJ a bad name. I'm not sure if they've cleaned them up any since I moved away for college, but those were some scary places to drive through.

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Coppertop

Undoubtedly on the list of safe large cities (with populations of ~150k+) or more. San Jose (my home town) is such a city - with close a million residents.

And yes, I'm too lazy to look up that info for you all. Paging Redlemon...

Redlemon

Sorry, statistics make my eyes cross. You are on your own.

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Leto

Ditto on the safety sentiment for me here in Toronto. Although with the recent gun violence, and a murder toll that has already reached 70 people this year alone, there is a sense of anxiety that the sky is falling.

Just last night my neigbour witnessed a fight between to people at the Woodbine/Danforth PetroCan station (i guess they were suffering from gas pump rage) one of them shouted that he had a gun in the car, and was going to get it. My neighbour had not yet started to pump gas, but she drove out as fast as she could, her gas cap still on top of the car. She came home, and right away called the police to report the car/licence# and description of the guy. She was very upset, and her kids were crying too.

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soccerchamp76

I dunno how St. Louis is so high on the unsafe side. Unless they include East St. Louis (actually in Illinois), I dunno how that can be. Either way, I live in the suburbs of St. Louis, not the downtown area which would probably have the higher crime rate.

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SERPENT7

Ratbastid,
Utah does not publish ANY of thier statistics. Not to the federal government, not to any one. Not crime, not divorce, not anything that could reflect badly on the mormons. (Or atleast that is my understanding, coming from all of the mormons i have talked to, these things are kept very hush-hush.)
The only numbers i could find were from organizations such as http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/utcrime.htm
I do not know how reliable this info is, however.

highthief

*shrug* - we've had what, 70 killings this year virtually everyone of them one little gangster shooting another or acts of domestic violence.

IMO, the average person has (virtually) diddly squat to fear as regards getting gunned down in T.O. - it's a rarity.

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Ustwo

Thats like saying you live outside Detroit

Oh and I see Detroit is the #2 city, go figure.

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joemc91

Yeah #3! They're talking about the city, not the suburbs. I can see where the crime comes from, mostly north of the city. The area just north of me is quite high crime. Probably the worst part is the burglary. Just two months after I moved here, my bike was stolen out of the basement. My friend's car has been broken into already. Not the most pleasant city.

JumpinJesus

I'm glad to see Chicago NOT make the top 10 unsafe cities.

Gary, IN is a depressing city. Driving through it makes you realize that here is a city society has forgotten.

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analog

Maybe... but you pay for it by having to live among such a high number of Mormons. It's worse than being in the "bible belt", man.

alansmithee

I've been to Gary, but I think Flint is worse. I've never seen a city that had such an air of desperation as Flint. How Detroit ranks ahead of Flint is beyond me.

Also suprising is how Troy ended up on the safest list. It's not bad, but the country must be much more dangerous than I thought if Troy is one of the safest cities.

Suave

I recognize most of the unsafe cities as being among the highest in the US for murder rates (at least 3 of them have been the top city in the past decade; Gary, New Orleans, Detroit).

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God of Thunder

We're #4! We're #4!

Got you beat.

Seriously man. Flint's not that bad. The worst threat to the city right now is an incompetent mayor who just bought the election of 6 city council members.

The second worst threat to the city is a PC technician who posts negative things about the city on a forum from city hall on a city PC on city time.

/looks around and whistles a tune.

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macmanmike6100

Here's a link to a source without registration: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112101386.html

And of course, when you're counting tiny cities like Mission Viejo, you're not going to see New York in the top ten. However, I think NY qualifies as one of the safest American metro areas (sans the NJ side!). Something must be said for that

disclaimer: I'm a NYer!

Sage

Cary made the list... interesting... seeing as how it's right next to Raleigh, which I had always understood to be a pretty mean place.

Asheville is, at least as far as I can tell, a pretty safe place- there's only a few areas of the city I would not recommend someone going after dark, and that would only be if they were white. I like it here

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smooth

ha, I thought Mission Viejo was a gated community

surprise, surprise, the wealthiest sections of Orange County made it to the top of the safe list. Just don't drive too far down the 405 and land your ass in Santa Ana or Long Beach or too far east and find yourself in a nasty part of the Inland Empire...

If you want a portrayal of the wealth concentration in this area, tune into any one of those popular OC shows on the tele these days. It shouldn't take too long to understand why the residents aren't committing too much violent crime on one another.

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BBtB

I for one would like to know exactly how they came up with this information. Not because I doubt the information per se (If I was going to just pick what I thought was the top 10 most dangerous cities I would have picked several of the ones on there just from personal experience and word of mouth) however I would like more information, like was this done per capita or not? It seems for the most part the 10 safest cities are considerbly smaller cities. The shame about articles (and research) like this is that is could tell us so much more then it does. They leave out most of the hard data because, for one, Americans as a whole have very short attention spans and would never get to that part of the article, that and if someone was to come to and show the corelations between crime and things such as income, education and health, well we just wouldn't want to hear such a thing.

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goddfather40

I believe the stats are for cities with populations over 75K. They are definitely per capita stats. I live within 5 miles of both Lake Forest and Mission Viejo, CA. It is almost unbearably safe down here. As smooth alluded to above, it is definitely a wealth thing, besides me of course . I see Lamborghinis or Ferraris driving around about every weekend. It's funny, a lot of people think Lake Forest is the "ghettoest" city in South Orange County.

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Suave

The reason smaller cities or towns tend to be safer is because they simply tend to be. One side-effect of highly populated urban areas is that you get large numbers of people who don't know each other in one area. When you don't know someone, it is easier to commit a crime. It also means you have a compact area with many social groups, all of which have their own sets of norms; these will inevitably clash from time to time. Not only are the OC areas wealthy, but they're homogeneous. You don't have anything much more different than little cliques going on, and hence little conflict.

If you really want to know more about crime rates, just look them up on the US census site. You can learn as much as you feel is possible from that data, which is as close to raw data as any person wants to get when it comes to a census.

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viejo gringo

Hard to believe that Larado was not on the bad ass list...

Halx

As a former resident of Thousand Oaks, CA, I must say.. safe = boring. It's a soccer mom infested suburbia, awash with SUVs, shopping malls, and grocery stores you need jogging shoes to survive in. Nothing happens - ever. Somebody dies of old age and it makes the paper.

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tecoyah

Funny...for all intent and purpose, Amherst, N.Y is Buffalo.....Hardly amongst the safest.

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Coppertop

You know, there's this old curse, it goes something like:

May you live in interesting times.

World's King

Damn... Denver sucks...


Oh well. I guess I have to start killing people to get on next years list.

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God of Thunder

Start with the Colorado Avalanche and you won't get any complaints from anyone in this state.

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World's King

Oddly... you might not get a bad reaction here either.

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