Safest Cities in Wisconsin (2024 FBI Data)

These are the Wisconsin 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.

81 Wisconsin cities qualify for the ranking: municipalities of 10,000+ residents with their own police department, reporting a full year of 2024 data. Muskego reports the lowest violent crime rate in the state at 11.8 per 100,000 residents.

Wisconsin cities of 10,000+ residents with their own municipal police department, ranked by reported violent crime rate, 2024 FBI data. 81 cities qualified; the 25 with the lowest reported violent rate are shown.
#	City	Population	Violent / 100k	Property / 100k	Grade
1	Muskego	25,389	11.8	1,532.2	A
2	Whitefish Bay	14,537	13.8	935.5	A
3	Plover	14,306	21.0	1,097.4	A
4	Shorewood	13,629	22.0	1,702.3	A
5	Monroe	10,373	28.9	1,147.2	A
6	Onalaska	19,068	36.7	2,291.8	A
7	Port Washington	12,888	38.8	566.4	A
8	Mequon	25,586	39.1	558.9	A
9	Cedarburg	12,649	47.4	395.3	A
10	Verona	16,443	48.7	662.9	A
11	Holmen	11,889	50.5	462.6	A
12	Franklin	35,535	50.7	1,207.3	A
13	Elkhorn	10,218	58.7	538.3	A
14	Germantown	21,066	61.7	1,120.3	A
15	New Berlin	40,186	62.2	992.9	A
16	Caledonia	25,323	63.2	469.9	A
17	Menomonee Falls	40,076	67.4	529.0	A
18	Hartland	10,259	68.2	341.2	A
19	De Pere	25,319	75.0	568.7	A
20	Grafton	12,788	78.2	617.8	A
21	Greendale	14,461	83.0	940.5	A
22	Brookfield	42,019	83.3	1,097.1	A
23	Deforest	11,195	89.3	812.9	A
24	Greenfield	36,919	92.1	2,307.8	B
25	Burlington	11,042	99.6	960.0	A

What the Wisconsin data shows

The typical Wisconsin city against the national baseline

The median ranked Wisconsin city reports 158.6 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — 58% below the national baseline of 381 that SafeNest grades against. Its median property rate is 1,120.3 per 100,000. 90.1% of the state's ranked cities report a violent rate below the national average.

How the grades fall

Across those 81 cities: 41 grade A, 28 B, 11 C, 0 D and 1 F. That puts 50.6% of Wisconsin'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 Wisconsin places are absent from the ranking, because each would otherwise take a top place without being a safe city (why):

43 county and sheriff agencies — county-wide averages are diluted by everything outside the urban core, so they outrank real cities without being cities.
4 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 Wisconsin moved

Year-over-year direction, as reported: of the 81 ranked Wisconsin cities with a comparable prior year, 41 reported a lower violent crime rate than the year before and 27 reported a higher one, with 13 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. 55 of 81 ranked Wisconsin cities reported no homicides at all.

How close the letters are in Wisconsin

3 of Wisconsin's 81 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 Wisconsin: 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 Wisconsin

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

The largest Wisconsin 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
Milwaukee	560,416	1,434.3	2,700.7	F
Madison	282,045	256.3	1,865.0	B
Green Bay	105,240	495.1	1,312.2	C
Kenosha	97,652	287.8	866.3	B
Racine	76,243	385.6	1,112.2	C
Appleton	74,394	201.6	1,346.9	B
Eau Claire	70,891	162.2	1,905.7	B
Waukesha	70,202	115.4	874.6	A

Why no small towns are on this list. Wisconsin has 230 municipalities under 10,000 residents in the FBI data. 79.1% of them are graded A, and 28.7% 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 Wisconsin

These are full SafeNest reports for Wisconsin 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 Milwaukee safe? — grade F, 1,431.0 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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