Congratulations DuPage County! You’re on the list!
Usually when you watch the evening news, it more often than not includes the negative things that are happening in our county. We need to switch gears and focus on the positive.
Backgroundchecks.org set out to do exactly that. They have shared their annual list of the Safest Cities to Live in Illinois 2019. DuPage County, you are amazing. You’ve hit the list, big time!
How they factored this data was pretty complicated. I’ll let them explain it.
We used the most recent FBI crime statistics to create state rankings. There were initially 7,430 cities in the data set. After filtering out the cities with populations of less than 10,000, 2,929 cities remained. We then calculated violent crime rates and property crime rates by dividing the crime numbers by the population to get rates per 1,000. We also calculated the ratio of law enforcement workers to per 1,000. These were weighted with -50% for the violent crime rate, -25% for the property crime rate, and +25% for the law enforcement rate. The resulting metric gave us a the safety index score. The higher this number more safe the city is.
So, what are the cities that are the safest? These are the best places to raise a family and kickstart a career, have award-winning public school systems and thriving local economies. Let’s not forget, extremely low property crime rates.
Topping the list at #1 is WARRENVILLE! It has a Safety Index of 0.91. WOW!
Here’s where the rest of DuPage County ranked on the list:
- 1 – Warrenville
- 3 – Elk Grove Village
- 4 – Burr Ridge
- 5- Wood Dale
- 21 – Carol Stream
- 30 – Glendale Heights
- 32 – Villa Park
- 41 – Downers Grove
- 45 – West Chicago
- 46 – Wheaton
- 72 – Lombard
To see the entire interactive list, visit backgroundchecks.org.
