These are the Arizona cities with the lowest violent crime rates reported to the FBI, drawn from the same database that powers SafeNest. Every figure below is computed from 2024 FBI data by a script committed alongside this page.
42 Arizona cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Oro Valley reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 51.4 per 100,000 residents.
| # | City | Population | Violent / 100k | Property / 100k | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oro Valley | 48,680 | 51.4 | 1,148.3 | A |
| 2 | Chino Valley | 14,059 | 78.2 | 469.5 | A |
| 3 | Paradise Valley | 12,440 | 80.4 | 988.7 | A |
| 4 | Douglas | 15,359 | 84.6 | 1,569.1 | A |
| 5 | San Luis | 38,809 | 87.6 | 548.8 | A |
| 6 | Sahuarita | 37,049 | 91.8 | 977.1 | A |
| 7 | Surprise | 163,202 | 109.1 | 875.6 | A |
| 8 | Marana | 60,507 | 117.3 | 1,350.3 | A |
| 9 | Florence | 23,354 | 119.9 | 548.1 | A |
| 10 | Gilbert | 277,527 | 132.6 | 968.2 | A |
| 11 | Chandler | 281,117 | 133.4 | 1,504.4 | A |
| 12 | Scottsdale | 245,237 | 153.3 | 1,875.3 | B |
| 13 | Buckeye | 114,513 | 166.8 | 771.1 | A |
| 14 | Somerton | 14,717 | 176.7 | 530.0 | A |
| 15 | Goodyear | 116,892 | 182.2 | 1,462.9 | B |
| 16 | Camp Verde | 12,597 | 190.5 | 1,135.2 | B |
| 17 | Sierra Vista | 44,119 | 219.9 | 1,663.7 | B |
| 18 | Kingman | 36,187 | 221.1 | 3,379.7 | C |
| 19 | Cottonwood | 13,441 | 223.2 | 1,168.1 | B |
| 20 | Maricopa | 75,614 | 224.8 | 868.9 | B |
| 21 | Prescott Valley | 51,116 | 226.9 | 768.8 | B |
| 22 | Nogales | 19,686 | 228.6 | 3,601.5 | C |
| 23 | Peoria | 201,056 | 258.1 | 1,205.1 | B |
| 24 | Payson | 16,845 | 267.1 | 1,222.9 | B |
| 25 | Coolidge | 20,276 | 305.8 | 1,528.9 | B |
What the Arizona data shows
The typical Arizona city against the national baseline
The median ranked Arizona city reports 227.8 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 40% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,303.4 per 100,000. 69.0% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.
How the grades fall
Across those 42 cities: 13 grade A, 12 B, 14 C, 3 D and 0 F. That puts 31.0% of Arizona's ranked cities at an A, against 38.5% of comparable cities nationally — below the national rate. The grade is national-relative, not a curve within the state: a city at exactly the US average violent and property crime rate scores 50 out of 100 and receives a C, wherever it is.
What the ranking leaves out
Two groups of Arizona places are absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):
- 12 county and sheriff agencies — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
- 1 city whose most recent full year is not 2024 — ranking one city's older data against another's is not a comparison.
Which way Arizona moved
Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 42 ranked Arizona cities with a comparable prior year, 22 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 16 reported a higher one, with 4 roughly level. That is what the agencies filed for 2024 against their own previous year — it is a record of what changed, not a projection of what happens next. 13 of 42 ranked Arizona cities reported no homicides at all.
How close the letters are in Arizona
1 of Arizona's 42 ranked cities would print a different letter grade if their violent crime count changed by a single incident. That is not a flaw peculiar to Arizona: every threshold system has a boundary and some cities sit on it. It is the concrete reason to treat the gap between adjacent grades — and adjacent positions in the table above — as noise rather than a finding.
The largest cities in Arizona
The ranking above is dominated by suburbs, because that is what a violent-crime rate does: it sorts small and affluent places to the top. Here are the biggest Arizona cities in the same data, ordered by population rather than by crime, so you can see where they actually land.
| City | Population | Violent / 100k | Property / 100k | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phoenix | 1,662,809 | 800.0 | 2,325.3 | D |
| Tucson | 548,789 | 589.7 | 3,313.1 | D |
| Mesa | 513,585 | 483.3 | 1,464.6 | C |
| Chandler | 281,117 | 133.4 | 1,504.4 | A |
| Gilbert | 277,527 | 132.6 | 968.2 | A |
| Glendale | 255,512 | 490.0 | 2,670.7 | C |
| Scottsdale | 245,237 | 153.3 | 1,875.3 | B |
| Peoria | 201,056 | 258.1 | 1,205.1 | B |
Why no small towns are on this list. Arizona has 30 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 30.0% of them are graded A, and 6.7% reported no violent crime at all. In a town of a few thousand people that is the expected outcome in a given year rather than evidence of anything, and a single incident would move the rate sharply. Ranking them against cities would put towns at the top of this page on the strength of a number that is mostly noise, so they are excluded from the ranking and reported here instead.
SafeNest city reports in Arizona
These are full SafeNest reports for Arizona cities — crime, flood history, schools and offender data. They are the state's larger cities, which is why most of them do not appear in the ranking above: a safest-cities list and a biggest-cities list are not the same list.
- Is Mesa safe? — grade C, 483.0 violent per 100,000
- Is Tucson safe? — grade D, 589.0 violent per 100,000
Method, in short
Rankings come from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data (2024), via the Kaplan agency panel
(DOI 10.3886/E100707V22). A city's score is
100 / (1 + severity), weighing its violent rate against a national baseline of 381 per
100,000 (70%) and its property rate against 1,954 per 100,000 (30%) —
the same code that grades cities in the SafeNest app. Every number here is computed by
generate_state_rankings.py; the ranking is a sort, not an edit.
A grade is not a verdict. It is a city-wide average of reported crime — an informational opinion, not a statement of fact, and not a description of any street, block or address. It may not be used for tenant screening, hiring or lending (Terms). Full sources and data vintages: methodology.
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