Study: Seattle ranks 150th in country’s safest cities

When you take a look at the chart ranking the safest cities, you have to scroll down for awhile until you find Seattle, embarrassingly sitting at 150th, between Oakland and Columbus.

The study is courtesy of WalletHub, the credit data company whose hobby is doing studies that make cities feel bad about themselves. In ranking safety, the study looked at 180 cities and 41 key indicators of safety, including assaults per capita, unemployment rate, and share of sheltered homeless, among others.

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While natural disaster risk and financial safety were measured, it was home and community safety where Seattle took the biggest hit. Seattle ranked 150th in safety, 141st in natural disaster risk, and did kind of well at 6th in financial safety risk, so at least Seattle has that going for it.

The study somewhat aligns with the recent prolific offenders report, which asserts that Seattle’s city attorney doesn’t prosecute roughly half of the non-traffic arrests brought to his office by police, and moves slowly to file charges on the rest.

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Taking data from municipal court system, Seattle police and City Attorney Pete Holmes’ office, “System Failure 2” asserts that the city prosecutor declines to file on nearly half of the referrals it receives (5,000 cases each year); takes more than six months to file charges on cases it does move forward; and declines to press charges 65 percent of the people who are suspected of crimes but
not in custody.

As for the WalletHub study, if you’re looking to make travel plans, Columbia, Maryland was listed as the safest city in the U.S., with St. Louis, Missouri coming in at last.

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