Two Indiana cities rank among the most dangerous with the highest cost of crime in America.
MoneyGeek, a personal finance technology company, analyzed crime statistics and applied research findings to find the safest and most dangerous cities where crime is the most costly.
Indianapolis ranked 287th and South Bend 278th out of 303 cities analyzed, while Fort Wayne was the state’s safest, ranking 194th – still below average but tops in the Hoosier state. The annual cost of crime in Indianapolis is $3.1 billion. In South Bend, crime costs more than $3,000 per capita, compared to $1,597 in Fort Wayne.
“In urban areas, poverty and crime are both attributable to other, deeper factors – like former red-lining policies and other institutionalized methods for preventing the accumulation of wealth,” Geoff Darcy, of Tulane University, said.
Evansville ranked 226th with a cost per capita of nearly $2,000.
The research found the average cost of crime in the United States is $1,849 per capita, and mass shootings in the U.S. in 2019 cost $5.7 billion, 3% of the total cost of crime.
MoneyGeek used research from the National institutes of Health into society’s costs of crime and estimated cost of reported crimes for each city. For the 300 cities examined, the cost of crime is $176 billion annually.
The report ranked Arlington, Virginia as the nation’s overall safest city, followed by Thousand Oaks, California; Allen, Texas; Cary, North Carolina; and Irvine, California.
The safest largest cities were Raleigh, North Carolina; Henderson, Nevada; Anaheim, California, Honolulu, Hawaii; and Mesa, Arizona.
Overall, the most dangerous cities with the highest cost of crime were St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Jackson, Mississippi and Memphis.
