Safest Cities, Portland, Maine Leads (2026)

1. FBI Crime Data Explorer, state summaries · 2025

How we got this. The Safety Score is The Honest Local’s own recipe. Each source ranks every place on its own from 0 to 100 and the score is the average, so a place has to do well on all of them to lead. The FBI publishes both a violent crime rate and a property crime rate for every state, so we blend the two instead of leaning on violent crime alone. Safe ought to account for burglary and theft too, not just the rarer, more severe crimes. Each rate ranks every state against every other state and the average of the two ranks is the score that decides the list. The plain violent crime rate is still what we show you. We read each state's own figures straight from the FBI, monthly rates per 100,000 people summed over the latest full calendar year, never a city standing in for its state. Cities carry their state's rates for now, because the FBI doesn't yet give us a clean city by city breakdown, and each city's row says so. It refreshes once a year, when the FBI publishes the prior year. For Portland, Maine, that means FBI Crime Data Explorer, Maine (state summary, monthly rates summed); state-level figure for Portland; the FBI publishes no city figure yet.

Rankings by The Honest Local from public data, one page per list, refreshed on each source’s own cycle. Places with no reading are left out rather than estimated. Every value on this page carries its source in the page’s structured data.

Photos More Than Just Parks · Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.