The Top 5 Safest Places in Washington State
- Sammamish
- Duvall
- Snoqualmie
- Ridgefield
- Selah
View the Complete Results
Value Penguin’s safest places study results: www.valuepenguin.com/2015-safest-places-washington-study
Though you may not suspect it, Clark County is home to one of the safest cities in Washington.
Ridgefield is the fourth-safest city in the state, according to Value Penguin, a New York-based number-crunching firm whose research is geared toward helping consumers make sound financial decisions. The ranking comes from an analysis of FBI crime data for 2013, the most recent figures available.
The findings were published in a study called “2015 Safest Places in Washington,” which came to The Columbian this week. The author, Brian Quinn, looked at cities with populations greater than 5,000, which amounted to 113 municipalities in all.
“We do that because anomalies in the data can often skew things too much for smaller towns,” Quinn explained in an email to the newspaper. “Also, there are some cities here and there that didn’t report their data to the FBI in 2013 and they weren’t included in the study either.”
That means La Center and Yacolt — each with populations smaller than 4,000 — weren’t included.
The analysis took into account both violent crimes — murder manslaughter, rape, robbery and assault — and property crimes, such as theft, burglary and arson. Then, a team of analysts standardized the data to show crime rates per 100,000 people, showing them how the state’s smallest and largest cities stack up against each other.
Finally, they used that data to calculate a “crime score” for each city, giving more weight to violent crimes. Those with the lowest scores were the deemed the safest places.
Ridgefield ended up with the third-lowest score among cities with a population size no larger than 15,000 people. Duvall and Snoqualmie ranked ahead of Ridgefield.
Among Clark County’s other cities, Camas ranked 19th and Battle Ground was 20th. Washougal, Woodland and Vancouver fell much lower on the list, respectively at 37th, 69th and 86th.
The biggest surprise, Quinn said, was that Sammamish took the top spot in the ranking this year.
“Typically, the top handful of cities are small, quaint towns,” he said. “Sammamish has a population of almost 50,000, which I think is the largest city to finish No. 1 in all of the studies we’ve done.”
According to the stats, Tukwila is the most dangerous city in the state. Washington’s three largest cities — Seattle, Spokane and Tacoma — also ranked among the bottom five.
As for Ridgefield, the city’s leaders weren’t surprised to see it’s considered a relatively safe city. With a population of slightly more than 5,000, Ridgefield barely squeaked into the study.
Ridgefield is also no stranger to high rankings on the statewide level. Last year, it fell behind Bothell as the second-fastest-growing city in Washington. But that doesn’t mean crime is keeping pace with the city’s population growth, Mayor Ron Onslow said.
“You might think it could contribute to a problem,” Onslow said, “but because of the people that are moving in and the fact that they want to contribute to our small city, it prevents crime.”
It also helps that the city has recently made a big push for neighborhoods and homeowners associations to adopt neighborhood watches and launch blogs to log activity on a hyper-local level, he said.
“We all try to come together,” Onslow said. “Then, people are kind of watching out for each other.”
