Safest Cities in Pennsylvania (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Pennsylvania 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.

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

Pennsylvania cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 223 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	West Manheim Township	10,755	0.0	483.5	A
2	Logan Township	12,101	0.0	1,388.3	A
3	Hampton Township	17,771	11.3	348.9	A
4	Cranberry Township	34,970	11.4	700.6	A
5	Whitpain Township	20,451	14.7	660.1	A
6	Franconia Township	13,488	14.8	392.9	A
7	Middletown Township	45,516	15.4	448.2	A
8	Westtown-east Goshen Reg	29,610	16.9	351.2	A
9	Westtown-East Goshen Regional	29,610	16.9	351.2	A
10	Forks Township	16,568	18.1	567.4	A
11	Lower Salford Township	16,255	18.5	363.0	A
12	Buckingham Township	20,736	19.3	400.3	A
13	East Cocalico Township	14,775	20.3	487.3	A
14	Warwick Township	14,703	20.4	367.3	A
15	Warwick Township, Bucks County	14,703	20.4	367.3	A
16	Plumstead Township	14,391	20.8	528.1	A
17	Haverford Township	50,544	21.8	1,026.8	A
18	Upper Saucon Township	17,864	22.4	503.8	A
19	Warrington Township	26,355	22.8	743.7	A
20	New Holland	12,898	23.3	759.8	A
21	Upper St. Clair Township	20,399	24.5	1,201.0	A
22	Horsham Township	27,268	25.7	836.1	A
23	Newtown Township, Delaware County	15,345	26.1	345.4	A
24	Lower Providence Townshi	25,975	26.9	546.7	A
25	Lower Providence Township	25,975	26.9	546.7	A

What the Pennsylvania data shows

The typical Pennsylvania city against the national baseline

The median ranked Pennsylvania city reports 83.7 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 78% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,045.8 per 100,000. 91.0% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 223 cities: 150 grade A, 41 B, 21 C, 10 D and 1 F. That puts 67.3% of Pennsylvania'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 Pennsylvania places are absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):

15 county and sheriff agencies — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
36 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.
10 cities whose most recent full year is not 2024 — ranking one city's older data against another's is not a comparison.

Which way Pennsylvania moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 223 ranked Pennsylvania cities with a comparable prior year, 95 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 90 reported a higher one, with 38 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. 158 of 223 ranked Pennsylvania cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Pennsylvania

8 of Pennsylvania's 223 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 Pennsylvania: 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 Pennsylvania

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

The largest Pennsylvania 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
Philadelphia	1,549,259	910.3	4,548.2	D
Pittsburgh	317,177	428.5	2,280.1	C
Allentown	124,599	272.1	1,569.0	B
Reading	97,868	338.2	1,434.6	C
Erie	92,379	375.6	1,929.0	C
Upper Darby Township	84,668	213.8	2,832.2	C
Bethlehem	79,194	207.1	1,368.8	B
Scranton	75,683	281.4	1,345.1	B

Why no small towns are on this list. Pennsylvania has 726 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 78.5% of them are graded A, and 31.4% 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.

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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