Alarms, Security Systems

Established in 1818, a family-oriented, walkable-community of little more than 100,000 residents just north east of Buffalo in Western New York state, Amherst is once again the safest town in America.

For the second consecutive year, a town with a deer-vehicle accident monitoring project listed among it's top initiatives earned Morgan Quitno Press' coveted "America's Safest City."

"For five of the eight years that we have issued the Safest City Award, Amherst has earned the No. 1 ranking," said Scott Morgan, president of the statistical publisher which also publishes "Most Livable State," "Healthiest State," "Safest State" and "Most Dangerous State".

"With no murders, the lowest burglary rate and the fifth-lowest rape and aggravated assault rates, Amherst has one of the lowest crime rates of any city," Morgan added.

The safest city award is a based on a city's rate for six crimes in data reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The crimes are murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft.

Amherst is a 54 square mile suburban community of 47,000 housing units, 70 percent of which are single-family homes. Approximately 64 percent of the community is developed, primarily as residential housing, but the remaining acreage is largely bucolic -- 21 percent is meadow and brushland, 13 percent wooded with 1 percent active agriculture lands and another 1 percent comprised of ponds, lakes, and streams, according to the Amherst town web site.

Earlier this year, Amherst also was one of nine New York cities commended for risk management efforts to mitigate and reduce exposure to certain dangers. The town's risk management efforts include defensive driving classes for public employees who drive often, "verbal judo" lessons for police officers, background checks on prospective child care employees, rubberizing landing areas at playgrounds, requiring groups that use town facilities to have million-dollar umbrella liability insurance coverage and other practices.

Rounding out the top five safest overall cities behind Amherst were Newton, MA; Mission Viejo, CA; Cary, NC and Brick Township, NJ.

Morgan Quitno also examined the overall safety of metropolitan areas and cities by population.

The five safest metro areas were the Appleton-Oshkosh-Neenah, WI; Wausau, WI; Bismark, ND; Danbury, CT and La Crosse, WI.

Among large cities, those with populations of more than 500,000, San Jose, CA, the capital of Silicon Valley and a large city with one of the nation's smallest per capita number of police officers was deemed safest, followed by Honolulu, HI; El Paso, TX; San Diego, CA and Austin, TX. The nation's largest city, New York City was the seventh-safest large city.

For mid-sized cities with populations from 100,000 to 499,999, the safest five were Amherst; Mission Viejo, CA; Simi Valley, CA; Sunnyvale, CA and Sterling Heights, MI.

The safest small cities with populations from 75,000 to 99,999 were Newton, MA; Cary, NC; Brick Township, NJ; Colonie, NY and Clarkstown, NJ at the top of the list.

At rock bottom in each category was Detroit, MI for most dangerous city overall and most dangerous city with large population; Atlanta, GA for most dangerous mid-sized city; Camden, NJ as the most dangerous small city and Pine Bluff, AR as the most dangerous metro area.

Based on the FBI's October, 2001 data, Morgan Quitno's methodology examined an area's crime rates per 100,000 population for the six basic crime categories and plugged the data into a formula that measured how a particular city or metro area compared to the national average for a given crime category.

The result was multiplied by a weight assigned to each of the six crime categories. Each of the six crimes was given equal weight so that cities were compared based solely on their crime rates and how their rates stack up to national averages for each crime. The weighted numbers for each city were then added to obtain a final score used to rank the city.

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