Report: Two Kentucky cities among most dangerous in terms of cost of crime
(The Center Square) – Two Kentucky cities rank among the bottom half of the safest cities in America with high costs of crime.
MoneyGeek, a personal finance technology company, analyzed crime statistics and applied research findings to determine the safest and most dangerous cities where crime is the most costly.
Louisville ranked 248th and Lexington 171st out of 303 cities analyzed. The annual cost of crime in Louisville is $1.7 billion, according to the study. In Lexington, crime costs $1,374 per capita and nearly a half-million dollars annually.
“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.
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.
