Safest Cities in Nebraska (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Nebraska 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.

16 Nebraska cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Papillion reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 33.9 per 100,000 residents.

Nebraska cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 16 cities qualified; the 16 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Papillion	23,597	33.9	1,004.4	A
2	La Vista	16,205	49.4	1,184.8	A
3	Beatrice	12,272	81.5	823.0	A
4	Columbus	24,595	85.4	927.0	A
5	Bellevue	63,510	99.2	1,132.1	A
6	Lexington	10,867	138.0	1,352.7	A
7	North Platte	22,268	148.2	2,582.2	B
8	Fremont	27,767	180.1	1,890.7	B
9	South Sioux City	13,801	188.4	2,652.0	B
10	Norfolk	26,234	202.0	1,143.6	B
11	Kearney	34,525	301.2	1,624.9	C
12	Hastings	24,815	318.4	2,006.9	C
13	Lincoln	295,808	349.2	2,445.8	C
14	Grand Island	52,488	369.6	1,760.4	C
15	Omaha	480,235	372.5	3,161.8	C
16	Scottsbluff	15,306	588.0	2,783.2	D

What the Nebraska data shows

The typical Nebraska city against the national baseline

The median ranked Nebraska city reports 184.2 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 52% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,692.7 per 100,000. 93.8% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 16 cities: 6 grade A, 4 B, 5 C, 1 D and 0 F. That puts 37.5% of Nebraska'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

One group of Nebraska places is absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):

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

Which way Nebraska moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 16 ranked Nebraska cities with a comparable prior year, 7 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 6 reported a higher one, with 3 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. 11 of 16 ranked Nebraska cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Nebraska

1 of Nebraska's 16 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 Nebraska: 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 Nebraska

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

The largest Nebraska 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
Omaha	480,235	372.5	3,161.8	C
Lincoln	295,808	349.2	2,445.8	C
Bellevue	63,510	99.2	1,132.1	A
Grand Island	52,488	369.6	1,760.4	C
Kearney	34,525	301.2	1,624.9	C
Fremont	27,767	180.1	1,890.7	B
Norfolk	26,234	202.0	1,143.6	B
Hastings	24,815	318.4	2,006.9	C

Why no small towns are on this list. Nebraska has 56 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 76.8% of them are graded A, and 26.8% 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 Nebraska

These are full SafeNest reports for Nebraska 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 Omaha safe? — grade C, 369.0 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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