The Safest Cities in New York, Ranked by FBI Data

These are the New York 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.

130 New York cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Scarsdale Village reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 5.7 per 100,000 residents.

What the New York data shows

The typical New York city against the national baseline

The median ranked New York city reports 114.7 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 70% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,345.0 per 100,000. 85.4% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 130 cities: 69 grade A, 29 B, 19 C, 13 D and 0 F. That puts 53.1% of New York'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

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

• 50 county and sheriff agencies — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
• 9 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.
• 8 cities whose most recent full year is not 2024 — ranking one city's older data against another's is not a comparison.

Which way New York moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 130 ranked New York cities with a comparable prior year, 66 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 46 reported a higher one, with 18 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. 89 of 130 ranked New York cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in New York

5 of New York's 130 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 New York: 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 New York

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