The National Council for Home Safety and Security (NCHSS) has done their annual crunching of numbers and have released their interpretation of this data to form a long list of the safest and not so safe cities in Texas.  

Now, before you take an extended look at the 220 plus cities listed and the methodology used, you might want to go to your kitchen spice rack and take out a few grains of salt.

To identify the safest cities in Texas, we reviewed the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics along with our own population data and internal research. We eliminated any cities that failed to submit a complete crime report to the FBI and removed cities with populations under 10,000.

The remaining cities were ranked based on the number of reported violent crimes (aggravated assault, murder, rape, and robbery) and property crimes (burglary, arson, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft) per 1,000 people. These variables were then weighted, with violent crimes accounting for 1.5 of the total (due to their severity) than property crimes.

You can't argue with the statistics compiled by the FBI, and I have no problem in weighing violent crimes over property crimes, but little intangibles such as 'their own internal research' raises a small red flag in my mind. Regardless, given the hard statistics, I certainly don't disagree that many cities in East Texas have a ways to go to get into the top 50% of the safest cities in Texas.

One side note, you'll notice that they said that any cities that did not submit a complete crime report were eliminated from consideration.  So, I'm assuming that must have been the reason that cities such as Tyler, Longview, and Katy were not included.

Here's the placement of cities and towns to which I'd like to draw attention.

  • 1. Colleyville
  • 2. Keller
  • 3. Highland Village
  • 4. Trophy Club
  • 5. Murphy
  • 46. Sulphur Springs
  • 82. Huntsville
  • 119. Nacogdoches
  • 159. Kilgore
  • 162. Ft. Worth
  • 163. Austin
  • 182. Dallas
  • 184. Palestine
  • 186. Jacksonville
  • 194. Lufkin
  • 199. Henderson
  • 208. Houston
  • 215. San Antonio
  • 224. Humble
  • The top five on this list are all in the Greater Dallas/Fort Worth Metro, and the median income in any of those cities is not less than $115,000 per year.
  • When you mark out some of the well-to-do suburbs of the Greater Houston area, Sulphur Springs is the highest ranking East Texas city on the list.  The highest ranking safest city within 75 miles of Lufkin/Nacogdoches goes to Huntsville who comes in at number 82.
  • Out of 224 cities, Nacogdoches comes in at 119, while Lufkin slides in at 194.  The violent crime rate of these two cities is comparable (3.40 - 3.81), however, Lufkin's high numbers in property crimes (42.15 per 1000 residents) is almost double that of Nacogdoches.
  • Other area cities such as Jacksonville, Henderson, and Palestine are at 184 or worse.  In fact, only Robstown (near Mexico) and Bellmead (near Waco) have worse violent crime numbers than Palestine.
  • Humble finished dead last mainly because of their terrible property crimes ratio.  They recorded nearly 100 property crimes per every 1,000 residents.

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