Safest Cities in Michigan (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Michigan 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.

115 Michigan cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Grosse Pointe Park reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 18.2 per 100,000 residents.

Michigan cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 115 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Grosse Pointe Park	10,982	18.2	1,566.2	A
2	Rochester	12,706	23.6	377.8	A
3	Berkley	14,859	33.6	343.2	A
4	Trenton	17,698	33.9	542.4	A
5	Bloomfield Township	43,611	36.7	541.1	A
6	White Lake Township	31,222	41.6	435.6	A
7	New Baltimore	11,961	41.8	401.3	A
8	Green Oak Township	20,129	44.7	402.4	A
9	Beverly Hills	10,332	48.4	493.6	A
10	Plymouth Township	26,824	48.5	652.4	A
11	Northville Township	30,866	48.6	722.5	A
12	Birmingham	21,326	56.3	642.4	A
13	East Grand Rapids	11,441	61.2	1,083.8	A
14	West Bloomfield Township	64,892	81.7	525.5	A
15	Fruitport Township	15,546	83.6	1,537.4	A
16	Farmington	11,334	88.2	352.9	A
17	Grosse Pointe Woods	15,665	95.8	1,487.4	A
18	Novi	66,366	99.4	655.5	A
19	Woodhaven	12,447	112.5	1,542.5	A
20	Chesterfield Township	45,674	113.9	1,046.5	A
21	Troy	87,422	115.5	1,276.6	A
22	Royal Oak	57,257	124.0	801.6	A
23	Midland	42,712	124.1	655.6	A
24	Lincoln Township	14,864	141.3	841.0	A
25	Brownstown Township	32,439	151.1	690.5	A

What the Michigan data shows

The typical Michigan city against the national baseline

The median ranked Michigan city reports 272.5 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 28% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,426.7 per 100,000. 62.6% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 115 cities: 32 grade A, 30 B, 30 C, 15 D and 8 F. That puts 27.8% of Michigan'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

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

57 county and sheriff agencies — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
6 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.
3 cities whose most recent full year is not 2024 — ranking one city's older data against another's is not a comparison.

Which way Michigan moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 115 ranked Michigan cities with a comparable prior year, 51 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 37 reported a higher one, with 27 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. 62 of 115 ranked Michigan cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Michigan

2 of Michigan's 115 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 Michigan: 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 Michigan

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

The largest Michigan 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
Detroit	651,171	1,781.6	4,305.3	F
Grand Rapids	195,913	910.1	2,480.7	D
Warren	135,843	544.0	1,554.0	C
Sterling Heights	133,058	230.7	1,042.4	B
Ann Arbor	118,025	303.3	1,715.7	C
Lansing	111,965	1,346.0	2,499.0	F
Dearborn	104,571	293.6	1,999.6	C
Clinton Township	99,056	320.0	1,429.5	C

Why no small towns are on this list. Michigan has 296 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 57.4% of them are graded A, and 16.6% 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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