These are the Vermont 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.
10 Vermont cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Williston reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 109.2 per 100,000 residents.
| # | City | Population | Violent / 100k | Property / 100k | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Williston | 10,071 | 109.2 | 4,557.6 | C |
| 2 | Essex | 22,347 | 111.9 | 1,731.8 | A |
| 3 | Milton | 10,733 | 186.3 | 670.8 | A |
| 4 | Colchester | 17,617 | 215.7 | 1,759.7 | B |
| 5 | South Burlington | 21,300 | 234.7 | 4,385.0 | C |
| 6 | Hartford | 10,759 | 316.0 | 920.2 | B |
| 7 | Bennington | 15,165 | 389.1 | 2,466.2 | C |
| 8 | Rutland | 15,579 | 475.0 | 3,793.6 | D |
| 9 | Burlington | 44,456 | 479.1 | 4,289.6 | D |
| 10 | Brattleboro | 12,092 | 645.1 | 4,035.7 | D |
What the Vermont data shows
The typical Vermont city against the national baseline
The median ranked Vermont city reports 275.4 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 28% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 3,129.9 per 100,000. 60.0% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.
How the grades fall
Across those 10 cities: 2 grade A, 2 B, 3 C, 3 D and 0 F. That puts 20.0% of Vermont'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 Vermont places is absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):
- 1 county or sheriff agency — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
Which way Vermont moved
Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 10 ranked Vermont cities with a comparable prior year, 4 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 6 reported a higher one, with 0 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. 7 of 10 ranked Vermont cities reported no homicides at all.
How close the letters are in Vermont
0 of Vermont's 10 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 Vermont: 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 Vermont
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 Vermont cities in the same data, ordered by population rather than by crime, so you can see where they actually land.
| City | Population | Violent / 100k | Property / 100k | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burlington | 44,456 | 479.1 | 4,289.6 | D |
| Essex | 22,347 | 111.9 | 1,731.8 | A |
| South Burlington | 21,300 | 234.7 | 4,385.0 | C |
| Colchester | 17,617 | 215.7 | 1,759.7 | B |
| Rutland | 15,579 | 475.0 | 3,793.6 | D |
| Bennington | 15,165 | 389.1 | 2,466.2 | C |
| Brattleboro | 12,092 | 645.1 | 4,035.7 | D |
| Hartford | 10,759 | 316.0 | 920.2 | B |
Why no small towns are on this list. Vermont has 42 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 64.3% of them are graded A, and 14.3% 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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