Safest Cities in Rhode Island (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Rhode Island 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.

25 Rhode Island cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Portsmouth reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 11.4 per 100,000 residents.

Rhode Island cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 25 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Portsmouth	17,579	11.4	347.0	A
2	East Greenwich	14,957	33.4	601.7	A
3	Smithfield	22,414	35.7	928.0	A
4	Cumberland	37,213	59.1	534.8	A
5	North Smithfield	12,796	62.5	1,133.2	A
6	North Kingstown	28,212	63.8	779.8	A
7	Tiverton	16,175	68.0	680.1	A
8	Westerly	23,540	68.0	913.3	A
9	Coventry	36,388	68.7	961.9	A
10	East Providence	47,555	73.6	681.3	A
11	Barrington	17,286	75.2	700.0	A
12	Warwick	84,297	79.5	1,147.1	A
13	Narragansett	14,591	82.2	404.4	A
14	Lincoln	23,308	85.8	1,111.2	A
15	Cranston	83,815	93.1	1,052.3	A
16	North Providence	34,355	104.8	634.6	A
17	Warren	11,286	115.2	735.4	A
18	Johnston	30,172	119.3	981.0	A
19	Middletown	16,680	119.9	791.4	A
20	Newport	24,957	176.3	1,490.6	B
21	West Warwick	31,675	198.9	558.8	A
22	Providence	193,679	276.7	1,657.9	B
23	Pawtucket	76,400	307.6	1,511.8	B
24	Central Falls	22,881	327.8	1,005.2	B
25	Woonsocket	43,776	390.6	1,500.8	C

What the Rhode Island data shows

The typical Rhode Island city against the national baseline

The median ranked Rhode Island city reports 82.2 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 78% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 913.3 per 100,000. 96.0% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 25 cities: 20 grade A, 4 B, 1 C, 0 D and 0 F. That puts 80.0% of Rhode Island'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

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

3 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.
2 cities whose most recent full year is not 2024 — ranking one city's older data against another's is not a comparison.

Which way Rhode Island moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 25 ranked Rhode Island cities with a comparable prior year, 15 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 6 reported a higher one, with 4 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. 19 of 25 ranked Rhode Island cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Rhode Island

0 of Rhode Island's 25 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 Rhode Island: 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 Rhode Island

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

The largest Rhode Island 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
Providence	193,679	276.7	1,657.9	B
Warwick	84,297	79.5	1,147.1	A
Cranston	83,815	93.1	1,052.3	A
Pawtucket	76,400	307.6	1,511.8	B
East Providence	47,555	73.6	681.3	A
Woonsocket	43,776	390.6	1,500.8	C
Cumberland	37,213	59.1	534.8	A
Coventry	36,388	68.7	961.9	A

Why no small towns are on this list. Rhode Island has 8 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 100.0% of them are graded A, and 0.0% 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.

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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