Safest Cities in Massachusetts (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Massachusetts 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.

152 Massachusetts cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Bedford reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 13.6 per 100,000 residents.

Massachusetts cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 152 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Bedford	14,659	13.6	443.4	A
2	Winchester	23,238	17.2	383.0	A
3	Shrewsbury	39,837	30.1	642.6	A
4	Reading	25,871	38.7	533.4	A
5	Westwood	16,551	42.3	1,148.0	A
6	Newburyport	19,232	46.8	395.2	A
7	Wellesley	31,973	46.9	484.8	A
8	Newton	89,935	48.9	599.3	A
9	Concord	18,335	49.1	540.0	A
10	Norfolk	11,824	50.7	380.6	A
11	Belmont	27,280	51.3	703.8	A
12	Needham	32,779	51.9	646.8	A
13	Milton	28,832	52.0	561.9	A
14	Norwell	11,498	52.2	478.3	A
15	Arlington	46,956	55.4	434.4	A
16	Littleton	10,485	57.2	438.7	A
17	Weston	12,041	58.1	357.1	A
18	Acton	24,506	65.3	350.9	A
19	North Reading	16,531	66.5	405.3	A
20	Wayland	13,959	78.8	480.0	A
21	Swampscott	15,907	81.7	1,075.0	A
22	Pembroke	18,610	91.3	354.6	A
23	Andover	37,152	94.2	777.9	A
24	Longmeadow	15,881	94.5	591.9	A
25	North Attleboro	31,565	95.0	1,032.8	A

What the Massachusetts data shows

The typical Massachusetts city against the national baseline

The median ranked Massachusetts city reports 214.2 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 44% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 800.6 per 100,000. 81.6% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 152 cities: 66 grade A, 55 B, 24 C, 5 D and 2 F. That puts 43.4% of Massachusetts'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 Massachusetts places are absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):

33 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.
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 Massachusetts moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 152 ranked Massachusetts cities with a comparable prior year, 64 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 60 reported a higher one, with 28 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. 122 of 152 ranked Massachusetts cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Massachusetts

2 of Massachusetts's 152 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 Massachusetts: 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 Massachusetts

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

The largest Massachusetts 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
Boston	659,049	628.0	2,021.7	D
Springfield	155,491	892.7	2,835.5	D
Cambridge	120,447	436.7	2,644.3	C
Lowell	116,062	532.5	1,662.9	C
Brockton	106,650	599.2	1,345.5	C
Quincy	103,550	335.1	1,332.7	C
Lynn	103,200	574.6	1,170.5	C
New Bedford	102,491	353.2	1,359.1	C

Why no small towns are on this list. Massachusetts has 132 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 81.8% of them are graded A, and 12.1% 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 Massachusetts

These are full SafeNest reports for Massachusetts 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 Boston safe? — grade D, 628.0 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.

See the data for one address

A city ranking is a starting point. SafeNest puts crime, offenders, flood history, schools, air quality and taxes for a single address in front of you in about 30 seconds.

Search an address free