Safest Cities in Minnesota (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Minnesota 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.

91 Minnesota cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Dayton reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 17.7 per 100,000 residents.

Minnesota cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 91 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Dayton	11,273	17.7	416.9	A
2	Lino Lakes	22,685	35.3	661.2	A
3	Cottage Grove	43,131	39.4	681.6	A
4	Minnetrista	11,072	45.2	343.2	A
5	Plymouth	76,577	50.9	1,023.8	A
6	Orono	18,943	52.8	490.9	A
7	Buffalo	16,627	54.1	421.0	A
8	Rosemount	28,220	56.7	499.6	A
9	Ramsey	28,813	62.5	517.1	A
10	Hibbing	15,915	62.8	666.0	A
11	Cambridge	10,802	64.8	1,694.1	A
12	Centennial Lakes	12,219	65.5	728.4	A
13	Sartell	19,845	65.5	1,244.6	A
14	Golden Valley	20,806	67.3	985.3	A
15	New Ulm	13,858	72.2	1,017.5	A
16	St. Peter	12,362	72.8	558.2	A
17	Edina	53,347	73.1	1,490.2	A
18	Eden Prairie	61,511	73.2	1,279.4	A
19	Lakeville	78,436	76.5	571.2	A
20	Savage	33,140	78.5	715.1	A
21	Hermantown	10,196	78.5	2,559.8	B
22	Stillwater	19,185	83.4	865.3	A
23	Chaska	29,431	84.9	635.4	A
24	White Bear Lake	23,106	86.6	1,324.3	A
25	Sauk Rapids	13,736	87.4	1,288.6	A

What the Minnesota data shows

The typical Minnesota city against the national baseline

The median ranked Minnesota city reports 154.0 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 60% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,350.8 per 100,000. 89.0% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 91 cities: 43 grade A, 26 B, 17 C, 4 D and 1 F. That puts 47.3% of Minnesota'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 Minnesota places are absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):

38 county and sheriff agencies — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
3 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.

Which way Minnesota moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 91 ranked Minnesota cities with a comparable prior year, 45 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 35 reported a higher one, with 11 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. 63 of 91 ranked Minnesota cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Minnesota

3 of Minnesota's 91 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 Minnesota: 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 Minnesota

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

The largest Minnesota 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
Minneapolis	423,282	1,161.6	5,142.9	F
St. Paul	304,051	618.0	2,834.1	D
Rochester	122,694	154.0	1,368.4	B
Duluth	88,003	220.4	2,954.4	C
Bloomington	86,598	312.9	3,464.3	C
Woodbury	80,940	98.8	1,179.9	A
Brooklyn Park	80,665	291.3	2,478.2	C
Lakeville	78,436	76.5	571.2	A

Why no small towns are on this list. Minnesota has 185 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 77.3% of them are graded A, and 32.4% 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.

SafeNest city reports in Minnesota

These are full SafeNest reports for Minnesota 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 Minneapolis safe? — grade F, 1,160.0 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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