Naperville named safest city in America

Naperville has been named the safest city in the country by a survey of crime data by finance data company MoneyGeek.

Another Chicago suburb, Joliet, was named eighth safest, according to the survey that analyzed data reported to the FBI in 2021 by 263 cities with at least 100,000 residents.

Naperville kept its No. 1 ranking with a “cost of crime per capita” of $156, tying with Sunnyvale, California.

Chicago ranked near the bottom of the list of safest cities: 239 of 263.

Chicago’s per capita crime cost of $4,060 was still well below that of St. Louis, Missouri, named the most dangerous city with a per capita crime cost of $8,457.

Other Illinois cities named in the survey:

• Aurora, 81st, with a per capita crime cost of $840
• Elgin, 117th, per capita crime cost of $1,135
• Springfield, 185th, per capita crime cost of $2,105
• Rockford, 213th, per capita crime cost of $2,779

Of the 15 most dangerous cities, nine were large cities with over 300,000 residents.

The analysis paired reported crime statistics with academic research on the societal costs of different types of crimes to estimate the cost of crime for each city.

The survey warned that crime statistics don’t capture a community’s whole story.

“Behind all these averages that people like to cite about the crime rates in different communities are individual people and their decisions about how they choose to engage in their community,” Jesse Bruhn, Annenberg assistant professor of education and economics at Brown University, said in the report.

Rich Hein/Sun-Times