Safest Cities in Missouri (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Missouri 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.

72 Missouri cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Town And Country reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 26.0 per 100,000 residents.

Missouri cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 72 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Town And Country	11,523	26.0	1,241.0	A
2	Manchester	17,912	44.7	1,300.8	A
3	Nixa	26,094	46.0	605.5	A
4	Ballwin	30,171	56.3	483.9	A
5	Lake St. Louis	19,334	56.9	605.2	A
6	O'fallon	94,911	59.0	479.4	A
7	Ozark	23,432	81.1	682.8	A
8	Jackson	15,842	82.1	1,035.2	A
9	Chesterfield	48,907	96.1	1,286.1	A
10	Crestwood	12,103	99.1	1,487.2	A
11	Clayton	17,501	102.9	794.2	A
12	Wentzville	48,377	109.6	744.2	A
13	Webster Groves	23,271	120.3	648.9	A
14	Republic	20,578	126.3	1,059.4	A
15	Monett	10,133	128.3	1,401.4	A
16	Eureka	13,566	132.7	862.5	A
17	St. Charles	72,143	135.8	887.1	A
18	Marshall	13,591	139.8	1,015.4	A
19	Troy	15,240	144.4	977.7	A
20	Raymore	26,124	149.3	1,110.1	A
21	Lee's Summit	105,053	149.4	2,294.1	B
22	Creve Coeur	18,340	163.6	1,717.6	B
23	Maryland Heights	27,351	168.2	1,330.8	B
24	Bolivar	11,523	173.6	1,024.0	A
25	Carthage	15,549	173.6	1,286.3	B

What the Missouri data shows

The typical Missouri city against the national baseline

The median ranked Missouri city reports 245.2 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 36% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,707.2 per 100,000. 70.8% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 72 cities: 22 grade A, 16 B, 20 C, 10 D and 4 F. That puts 30.6% of Missouri'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

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

47 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 whose most recent full year is not 2024 — ranking one city's older data against another's is not a comparison.

Which way Missouri moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 72 ranked Missouri cities with a comparable prior year, 31 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 30 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. 41 of 72 ranked Missouri cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Missouri

4 of Missouri's 72 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 Missouri: 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 Missouri

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

The largest Missouri 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
Kansas City	511,437	1,547.4	4,677.0	F
St. Louis	277,294	1,368.9	5,706.9	F
Springfield	170,527	1,179.3	4,184.7	F
Columbia	130,354	349.0	2,317.5	C
Independence	120,271	572.0	3,523.7	D
Lee's Summit	105,053	149.4	2,294.1	B
O'fallon	94,911	59.0	479.4	A
St. Charles	72,143	135.8	887.1	A

Why no small towns are on this list. Missouri has 309 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 52.8% of them are graded A, and 23.0% 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 Missouri

These are full SafeNest reports for Missouri 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 Kansas City safe? — grade F, 1,547.0 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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