Safest Cities in Kentucky (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Kentucky 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.

41 Kentucky cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Mount Washington reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 31.9 per 100,000 residents.

Kentucky cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 41 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Mount Washington	18,811	31.9	558.2	A
2	Fort Thomas	16,826	47.5	487.3	A
3	Alexandria	10,778	55.7	723.7	A
4	Lawrenceburg	12,241	57.2	539.2	A
5	La Grange	10,537	66.4	911.1	A
6	Versailles	27,727	68.5	757.4	A
7	Erlanger	19,827	70.6	524.5	A
8	Berea	16,135	86.8	849.1	A
9	Madisonville	19,294	98.5	590.9	A
10	Murray	18,191	99.0	1,429.3	A
11	Lyndon	10,877	101.1	2,528.3	B
12	Jeffersontown	28,563	105.0	2,275.7	B
13	Danville	17,406	109.2	1,045.6	A
14	Nicholasville	32,866	112.6	1,497.0	A
15	Georgetown	40,037	124.9	1,168.9	A
16	St. Matthews	17,289	127.2	5,095.7	C
17	Shelbyville	17,959	133.6	1,007.9	A
18	Shepherdsville	14,843	134.7	1,792.1	B
19	Paris	10,057	139.2	805.4	A
20	Elizabethtown	33,522	140.2	698.0	A
21	Franklin	10,556	142.1	881.0	A
22	Bardstown	13,917	165.3	1,394.0	B
23	Glasgow	15,413	168.7	2,108.6	B
24	Winchester	19,283	171.1	2,795.2	B
25	Radcliff	22,658	172.1	1,999.3	B

What the Kentucky data shows

The typical Kentucky city against the national baseline

The median ranked Kentucky city reports 142.1 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 63% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,634.8 per 100,000. 95.1% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 41 cities: 17 grade A, 13 B, 10 C, 1 D and 0 F. That puts 41.5% of Kentucky'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

Two groups of Kentucky places are absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):

71 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 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.

Which way Kentucky moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 41 ranked Kentucky cities with a comparable prior year, 19 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 12 reported a higher one, with 10 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. 19 of 41 ranked Kentucky cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Kentucky

0 of Kentucky's 41 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 Kentucky: 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 Kentucky

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 Kentucky cities in the same data, ordered by population rather than by crime, so you can see where they actually land.

The largest Kentucky cities in the ranking, by population — not by crime. Big cities carry higher reported rates almost everywhere, which is why a safest-cities list and a biggest-cities list look nothing alike.
City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
Louisville	676,843	708.6	3,326.2	D
Lexington	323,254	262.0	2,274.4	C
Bowling Green	77,503	224.5	2,928.9	C
Owensboro	60,096	349.4	2,917.0	C
Covington	40,984	287.9	1,634.8	B
Georgetown	40,037	124.9	1,168.9	A
Richmond	38,072	215.4	1,972.6	B
Elizabethtown	33,522	140.2	698.0	A

Why no small towns are on this list. Kentucky has 186 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 84.9% of them are graded A, and 41.4% 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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