What is the safest place to live near Atlanta Georgia?

Considering a move to the Peach State with your family? For peace of mind, you’ll likely want to move to a community with low crime rates and an effective police force. We’ve made the search easier for you by giving all Georgia’s cities with a population over 10,000 a Safety Index score based on violent crime rate, property crime rate, and the ratio of law enforcement employees to residents. Let’s take a closer look at Georgia’s five safest cities, which are uniformly located in the upper half of the state.

The small city of Holly Springs in Cherokee County earns the title of Georgia’s safest. Holly Springs violent crime rate of 1.03 per 1K and property crime rate of 12.36 per 1K are considerably below both national and state averages. 

Peachtree City earns Georgia’s #2 spot. The Fayette County community of 35,300 recorded a mere 14 violent crimes in 2017 for a very low rate of 0.4 per 1,000, making it a great place to raise a family without fear of incident. 

At third place, Duluth is another mid-sized suburb of Atlanta with very low violent crime and property crime rates. In addition to being very safe, Duluth is also an affordable place to settle for middle class families. 

We move away from the Atlanta area for #4 Grovetown, a small yet growing city of 13,841 with a violent crime rate of just 0.65 per 1,000 residents. Low crime and steady development make it a great place to relocate to if you are working in the Augusta metropolitan area.  

Next, Loganville rounds out our look at Georgia’s five safest cities. About 32 miles west of downtown Atlanta, Loganville recorded a violent crime rate of 1.18 per 1,000, which is over twice as low as the Georgia average.

Methodology

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.

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