Forbes ranks the Greater Boston area as the fourth-safest place among the largest 40 U.S. cities. The ranking defines Greater Boston as Boston, Cambridge and Quincy with a total of 4.5 million residents. The ranking weighed the factors of violent crime, workplace fatalities, traffic death rates and natural disaster risk.
Minneapolis-St. Paul came in first, followed by Milwaukee, Portland and Seattle which tied for fourth with Boston. Among the 40 metro areas in the ranking, Miami was last. Boston ranked 10th in violent crimes but had the best ranking in traffic-related deaths and 28th in natural disaster risk.
None of these Forbes lists means anything. All the criteria are wrong. You can’t mix a soup of violent crime and traffic deaths and get an accurate read on safety. Even being 10th on the list of violent crimes paints a skewed picture. Are these crimes spread about or limited to locales where residents are, say, killing each other.
Boston, Cabridge and Quincy don’t even make a million people. The true Greater Boston as we know it is about 3 million. This includes many more towns. Our metropolitan statistical area is about 5.5 million. We are the 5th biggst (biggest means population) metro area in the country (wow, l betcha didn’t know that).
When people think of "safe cities," they are thinking of violent crime, break-ins, care theft, and other personal property crime like purse snatchings. And they are thinking of it in terms of the every day Jane and John living their lives without fear. Or they think of travelling John’s and traveling Jane’s chance of getting mugged.
Paris has a lot of crime, but not much in the areas tourists visit most. Show me a list of safest cities based on whether you have to walk around with fear. I’d place us in the top 2 safest based on that. And yes, I’d consider New York the 2nd.
You can’t walk alone in daylight in downtown Dallas without asking to be a target. Same goes for Atlanta after dusk. Detroit? Forget about it! But you can bop around after dark in the most popular stomping and living spots in Boston and Manhattan and get by quite all right.
The moral of the story is the answer to this: what city do you feel safest traveling to and living in?
I’ll take Boston over any other. The violence is, most usually, highly concentrated. And we have many fewer muggings, car jackings and random assaults than any other city. Take The Shawmut Penninsula and the shaft of Back Bay and such, and these most popular stomping spots and tourist spots show that the city rocks on safety.