Oxford Ranked 4th Safest City in Mississippi

The Movoto Real Estate Blog takes a unique approach to collecting and analyzing city and state data to help you make informed decisions. Previously, Movoto released it’s rankings for Mississippi’s Best Cities (Oxford was 3rd). Today, the same brokerage firm has declared Oxford as the fourth safest city in Mississippi!
Skeptical? Check out our Daily Crime Reports, provided by local law enforcement. The proof is in the lack of crime to report. Click Here to read more.
Check out their findings below, including how they came to this conclusion.
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At the Movoto Real Estate Blog, we know how difficult it can be to find the perfect place to live. You need to think about costs, weather, job availability, schools, and most important of all, the city’s safety. That’s why we are going from state to state to find out just which towns, cities, and other places within the state are the very safest.
Today we are heading to one state that certainly sounds safe and welcoming: The Hospitality State. So which Mississippi place was the safest of them all? According to our analysis, it was the City of Petal. Here is the complete list of the 10 safest places in Mississippi:

1. City of Petal
2. City of Brandon
3. City of Madison
4. City of Oxford
5. City of Long Beach
6. City of Byram
7. City of Pearl
8. City of Clinton
9. City of Southaven
10. City of Brookhaven

To find out how we came up with this ranking, keep reading and you’ll learn more about our method. We’ll also take a closer look at each of these 10 places.

How We Created This Ranking

In order to find these 10 safest places in Mississippi, we started with a list of places in the state with populations of 10,000 residents or more, gathered from the U.S. Census. From there, we used the latest Uniform Crime Report from the FBI (2012) to find crime data for these places, omitting any that did not report crime data to the bureau. This left us with a total of 32 places, which we then looked at according to the following:

• Murder
• Rape
• Robbery
• Assault
• Burglary
• Theft
• Vehicle theft

 
We then divided these crimes into four categories:

• Murders
• Violent crimes
• Property crimes
• Total crimes

 
In order to fairly compare places with both large and small populations, we calculated all of these crime rates based on crimes per 100,000 residents. We ranked each place with a score from one to 32 in terms of all categories—murders, violent crimes, property crimes, and total crimes, per 100,000 people with one being the safest possible score.
Next, we weighted these rankings so that murders, violent crimes, and property crimes each made up 30 percent of the overall score, where the total number of crimes accounted for a smaller portion of the final score; 10 percent. Finally, we averaged these weighted rankings into one overall Big Deal Score, with the lowest score being our safest place, Petal.
You can view a full ranking of all the places we looked at in Mississippi at the end of this article. But first, we’ll take a closer look at each of our top 10 safest, starting with our winner.

The 10 Safest Places In Mississippi By Movoto Real Estate
1. Petal
This was actual not the first time this Forrest County City had graced one of our lists at Movoto; it ranked as No. 9 on our list of Mississippi’s Best Places overall. And one main reason for that was its safety.
Like nine out of 10 of the places on this list, Petal saw no murders in 2012. But what really made it stand out was its nearly nonexistent crime rate—just 706 total crimes per 100,000 people for the year. This included 18 violent crimes and 688 property crimes per 100,000, giving residents just a 1 in 142 chance of being the victim of a crime; the lowest likelihood out of any place in the state by far. No wonder they call this place the “Friendly City.”
2. Brandon
Another city that was first seen in our Best Places in Mississippi list, Brandon came in as the second safest place, particularly for its low number of violent crimes. In 2012, this Rankin County city had a total of just 28 violent crimes per 100,000 people, including no murders, 14 rapes, nine robberies, and five assaults.
This may sound like a lot when it is listed out like this, but for comparison, look at the similarly sized city of Vicksburg. Here, there were eight murders, 89 rapes, 122 robberies, and 515 assaults per 100,000 in 2012, plus a total of 6,575 property crimes, whereas Brandon only had 688.
3. Madison
Not only did Madison rank second on our list of the state’s Best Places, it was also one of the wealthiest cities in the state, and, according to this analysis, one of the safest. That’s because in 2012, Madison had a total of just 917 crimes, including 860 property crimes, 57 violent crimes, and no murders per 100,000 people. That meant that Madison ranked second for both its lack of property crime and total crime, and fifth for its lack of violence.
All of that means that residents in Madison can feel secure, with just a 1 in 109 chance of being the victim of a crime, where many of the cities in the state’s odds were much higher; 1 in 13 in Jackson, for example.
4. Oxford
No. 3 on our Best Places list, this place ranked the fourth safest in the state for this list. Not only is this college town home to some of the finest schools in the nation (including, of course, the University of Mississippi), it also had some of the lowest violence and property crime numbers.
In 2012, Oxford had a reported total of 1,121 crimes per 100,000 people, which included 1,080 property crimes and 41 violent crimes per 100,000. To break that down further, these property crimes included 67 vehicle thefts, 756 thefts, and 257 burglaries; and the violent crimes included 21 assaults, 15 robberies, five rapes, and no murders per 100,000. Students, teachers, parents, and everyone else can certainly feel safe in this city.
5. Long Beach
Ranking first in our Best Places list, Long Beach is certainly making a (good) reputation for itself on the Movoto Blog. With just 34 violent crimes per 100,000 people, this Harrison County city came in as the third least violent overall.
Of those 34 violent crimes, there were no murders, seven rapes, seven robberies, and 20 assaults per 100,000. To put that into perspective, take a look at the similarly sized Greenwood, where in 2012 alone, there were seven murders, 153 rapes, 240 robberies, and 326 assaults. Additionally, Long Beach saw 2,147 property crimes in 2012, for a total of just 2,181 crimes per 100,000 for the entire year.
Click Here to read more about all of Mississippi’s Safest Places list.
Written by Natalie Grigson. Who is Movoto Real Estate, you might ask? Movoto is a national online real estate brokerage. Our blog has been recognized for its unique approach to city-based research by major news organizations around the world such as Forbes, CBS News, and The New York Times.