These are the Illinois 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.
190 Illinois cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Troy reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 8.9 per 100,000 residents.
| # | City | Population | Violent / 100k | Property / 100k | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Troy | 11,297 | 8.9 | 460.3 | A |
| 2 | Cary | 18,035 | 11.1 | 476.9 | A |
| 3 | Northbrook | 33,610 | 17.9 | 1,208.0 | A |
| 4 | Lake Forest | 19,357 | 20.7 | 625.1 | A |
| 5 | Buffalo Grove | 42,283 | 21.3 | 716.6 | A |
| 6 | Wilmette | 26,685 | 22.5 | 1,187.9 | A |
| 7 | La Grange Park | 12,874 | 23.3 | 675.8 | A |
| 8 | Warrenville | 15,530 | 25.8 | 714.7 | A |
| 9 | Deerfield | 18,795 | 26.6 | 1,010.9 | A |
| 10 | Burr Ridge | 10,971 | 27.3 | 865.9 | A |
| 11 | Bartlett | 39,656 | 27.7 | 390.9 | A |
| 12 | Huntley | 28,439 | 28.1 | 429.0 | A |
| 13 | Orland Park | 56,593 | 28.3 | 1,097.3 | A |
| 14 | Edwardsville | 26,663 | 30.0 | 682.6 | A |
| 15 | Frankfort | 21,108 | 33.2 | 668.0 | A |
| 16 | Lemont | 17,507 | 34.3 | 542.6 | A |
| 17 | Oswego | 37,893 | 34.3 | 551.6 | A |
| 18 | Antioch | 14,907 | 40.2 | 530.0 | A |
| 19 | Swansea | 14,515 | 41.3 | 744.1 | A |
| 20 | Darien | 21,599 | 41.7 | 916.7 | A |
| 21 | Sycamore | 18,718 | 42.7 | 1,009.7 | A |
| 22 | Lisle | 23,074 | 43.3 | 455.1 | A |
| 23 | Hinsdale | 17,272 | 46.3 | 492.1 | A |
| 24 | Morton Grove | 23,782 | 46.3 | 1,135.3 | A |
| 25 | Mundelein | 31,876 | 47.1 | 724.7 | A |
What the Illinois data shows
The typical Illinois city against the national baseline
The median ranked Illinois city reports 128.2 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 66% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,109.1 per 100,000. 83.2% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.
How the grades fall
Across those 190 cities: 108 grade A, 32 B, 36 C, 9 D and 5 F. That puts 56.8% of Illinois's ranked cities at an A, against 38.5% of comparable cities nationally — above 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
Three groups of Illinois places are absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):
- 41 county and sheriff agencies — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
- 10 cities reporting implausibly little crime — an agency can file a full year and report almost nothing in it. That is a reporting gap, not safety, and it would otherwise take first place.
- 15 cities whose most recent full year is not 2024 — ranking one city's older data against another's is not a comparison.
Which way Illinois moved
Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 190 ranked Illinois cities with a comparable prior year, 85 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 85 reported a higher one, with 20 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. 114 of 190 ranked Illinois cities reported no homicides at all.
How close the letters are in Illinois
7 of Illinois's 190 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 Illinois: 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 Illinois
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 Illinois 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago | 2,638,698 | 539.8 | 3,472.4 | D |
| Aurora | 170,585 | 276.7 | 1,296.7 | B |
| Joliet | 150,569 | 350.0 | 1,244.6 | C |
| Naperville | 150,521 | 83.7 | 883.6 | A |
| Rockford | 145,280 | 1,081.4 | 2,517.2 | D |
| Elgin | 112,879 | 266.7 | 1,102.1 | B |
| Springfield | 111,965 | 901.2 | 4,911.4 | F |
| Peoria | 109,677 | 1,344.9 | 4,284.4 | F |
Why no small towns are on this list. Illinois has 371 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 68.2% of them are graded A, and 27.8% 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.
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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