N.Y. city ranked safest

Tuesday, Nov. 26, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Amherst, a Buffalo suburb with 107,000 residents, had the nation's lowest rates for overall violent crime and burglary. Amherst Police Chief John Askey attributed the safety to the city's suburban setting and affluent, well-educated population.

The magazine asked a statistics firm to rank the cities by adjusting the FBI's 1995 crime statistics to give greater emphasis to crimes that a poll of 501 respondents found most threatening. Two-thirds of those who responded to the October poll said they feared burglary most. Among the 202 cities named in the survey, Henderson ranked 33rd, Reno was 68th and Las Vegas was ranked 168th.

"Most cities with populations of more than 100,000 are urban settings where there is street crime, crowded living conditions and high levels of poverty," Askey told the magazine. "Amherst is more like a big quiet suburb than a city, so we don't have those problems."

Amherst had 79 violent crimes and 201 burglaries per 100,000 residents, 88 percent and 80 percent below the national average.

But its police force, at a ratio of 140 police per 100,000 residents, was more than tripled by the ratio of police to people in Newark, the nation's most unsafe city in the survey.

Newark has 446 police officers per 100,000 residents, nearly twice the national average. But the city of 260,000 residents had the nation's highest violent-crime rate, with one in 25 residents a victim.

All of the 10 safest cities on the list had police-resident ratios at least 25 percent below the national average.

The survey, appearing in the magazine's Dec. 2 issue, ranked Thousand Oaks, Calif., behind Amherst, followed by Irvine, Calif.; Simi Valley, Calif., and Sunnyvale, Calif.

The most dangerous cities were Newark; Atlanta; St. Louis; New Orleans and Detroit.