As WalletPop notes, "some city neighborhoods are actually safer than most neighborhoods in America regardless of whether they are urban or rural." The area around Cahuenga Blvd. in L.A. comes out on top, with a crime rate of .96 per thousand.
Of course, the Cahuenga neighborhood is quite wealthy and exclusive, as the developers of this list note.
"The safest big city neighborhoods discovered tend to be of two types; highly affluent city neighborhoods, on one hand, but also more modest income neighborhoods with many tightly-knit working class families."
The data comes from a site called NeighborhoodScout.com that takes FBI data from local law enforcement agencies to develop their ranking.
Jamie Smith Hawkins at the Baltimore Sun did a little digging into NeighborhoodScout's process:
"There's also modeling at work. NeighborhoodScout's parent, Location Inc., says it uses "proprietary computer models developed by its expert analysts to statistically estimate the number of violent crimes and property crimes for every neighborhood in the U.S." That's designed to try to deal with less-than-ideal data, including "the lack of specific locations for crimes reported by most law enforcement agencies.""
Read the full story: Safest Neighborhoods in America's Top Cities 2010
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