Safest Cities in Ohio (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Ohio 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.

175 Ohio cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Bainbridge Township reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 0.0 per 100,000 residents.

Ohio cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 175 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Bainbridge Township	12,921	0.0	1,006.1	A
2	Aurora	17,869	16.8	380.5	A
3	Berea	17,886	22.4	374.6	A
4	Tiffin	17,483	22.9	572.0	A
5	Rocky River	21,256	23.5	418.7	A
6	American Township	12,432	24.1	1,874.2	A
7	Powell	14,572	27.4	899.0	A
8	Perrysburg	25,302	27.7	446.6	A
9	Upper Arlington	35,410	28.2	799.2	A
10	Westlake	34,189	29.2	649.3	A
11	Hamilton Township	28,313	31.8	377.9	A
12	Hamilton Township, Warren County	28,313	31.8	377.9	A
13	Hudson	22,932	34.9	475.3	A
14	Clearcreek Township	19,749	35.4	405.1	A
15	Mason	35,923	36.2	528.9	A
16	Perrysburg Township	13,762	36.3	1,213.5	A
17	Montgomery	10,784	37.1	658.4	A
18	Centerville	26,281	38.1	1,008.3	A
19	Norwalk	17,164	40.8	611.7	A
20	Kettering	56,562	42.4	1,501.0	A
21	Beachwood	13,758	43.6	2,231.4	A
22	Springboro	19,591	45.9	602.3	A
23	Celina	10,870	46.0	975.2	A
24	Vermilion	10,722	46.6	559.6	A
25	Madison Township	19,179	46.9	344.1	A

What the Ohio data shows

The typical Ohio city against the national baseline

The median ranked Ohio city reports 132.6 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 65% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,362.4 per 100,000. 87.4% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 175 cities: 89 grade A, 46 B, 26 C, 8 D and 6 F. That puts 50.9% of Ohio'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 Ohio places are absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):

58 county and sheriff agencies — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
16 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.
24 cities whose most recent full year is not 2024 — ranking one city's older data against another's is not a comparison.

Which way Ohio moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 175 ranked Ohio cities with a comparable prior year, 69 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 84 reported a higher one, with 22 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. 114 of 175 ranked Ohio cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Ohio

6 of Ohio's 175 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 Ohio: 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 Ohio

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

The largest Ohio 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
Columbus	915,447	435.0	2,653.3	C
Cleveland	362,762	1,561.1	4,426.3	F
Cincinnati	311,599	848.5	3,829.3	D
Toledo	263,668	1,041.1	2,732.2	D
Akron	188,223	820.3	2,955.0	D
Dayton	134,857	1,339.2	4,334.2	F
Parma	78,967	119.0	710.4	A
Canton	68,725	1,121.9	3,454.3	F

Why no small towns are on this list. Ohio has 311 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 77.2% of them are graded A, and 23.2% 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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