Safest Cities in Washington (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Washington 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.

90 Washington cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Sedro Woolley reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 15.3 per 100,000 residents.

Washington cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 90 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Sedro Woolley	13,103	15.3	679.2	A
2	Sammamish	64,358	28.0	539.2	A
3	Mercer Island	24,416	36.9	1,241.0	A
4	Bainbridge Island	24,063	37.4	951.7	A
5	Snoqualmie	13,265	45.2	1,070.5	A
6	Camas	27,525	47.2	733.9	A
7	Newcastle	12,636	47.5	2,271.3	A
8	Kirkland	90,687	60.6	2,012.4	A
9	Lake Forest Park	12,812	62.4	1,685.9	A
10	Enumclaw	12,722	62.9	1,414.9	A
11	Kenmore	23,227	64.6	1,007.4	A
12	Burlington	10,762	74.3	6,067.6	C
13	Battle Ground	22,780	79.0	1,036.0	A
14	Woodinville	13,804	79.7	2,991.9	B
15	Ridgefield	16,769	83.5	1,073.4	A
16	Anacortes	18,123	93.8	1,495.3	A
17	Ferndale	16,293	104.3	1,601.9	A
18	Mukilteo	20,845	105.5	1,717.4	A
19	Maple Valley	28,551	108.6	1,471.1	A
20	Bothell	50,917	110.0	1,368.9	A
21	Oak Harbor	23,817	113.4	877.5	A
22	Lake Stevens	41,000	117.1	648.8	A
23	Mill Creek	20,687	125.7	1,832.1	B
24	Pullman	33,105	129.9	821.6	A
25	Redmond	82,746	130.5	2,739.7	B

What the Washington data shows

The typical Washington city against the national baseline

The median ranked Washington city reports 235.2 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 38% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 2,204.8 per 100,000. 76.7% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 90 cities: 22 grade A, 24 B, 31 C, 10 D and 3 F. That puts 24.4% of Washington'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

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

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

Which way Washington moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 90 ranked Washington cities with a comparable prior year, 52 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 21 reported a higher one, with 17 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. 43 of 90 ranked Washington cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Washington

2 of Washington's 90 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 Washington: 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 Washington

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

The largest Washington 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
Seattle	760,058	775.5	5,007.6	D
Spokane	229,529	677.5	4,840.8	D
Tacoma	223,980	1,063.0	5,603.6	F
Vancouver	198,194	583.8	3,407.3	D
Bellevue	151,520	139.9	3,339.5	B
Kent	132,324	489.7	3,771.0	D
Everett	111,276	266.9	3,219.0	C
Spokane Valley	109,852	242.1	3,515.6	C

Why no small towns are on this list. Washington has 90 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 56.7% of them are graded A, and 13.3% 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.

SafeNest city reports in Washington

These are full SafeNest reports for Washington cities — crime, flood history, schools and offender data. They are the state's larger cities, which is why most of them do not appear in the ranking above: a safest-cities list and a biggest-cities list are not the same list.

Is Seattle safe? — grade D, 775.0 violent per 100,000

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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