CHEYENNE, Wyo. – According to research conducted by Alarms.org, Cheyenne ranks as the 9th safest city in Wyoming.
Green River was ranked as the most safe by the Alarms study, with just 14 violent crimes being logged in 2018, which gave them a violent crime rate of just 1.16 per 1K. Green River’s property crime rate registered at 8.48 per 1K, which made it the lowest in the state.
While Laramie actually has a lower violent crime rate than #1 Green River, it came in at #2 in this study due to its slightly higher property crime rate of 12.15 per 1K people.
Cheyenne came in with a crime rate of 43.10 per 1K people.
Alarms claims that in order to identify the safest cities, they reviewed the 2016-2018 FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics. In their report they eliminated any cities that failed to submit a complete crime report to the FBI and cities with populations under 10,000.
There are two broad classifications of crimes used in the study:
- Violent crimes
- Non-violent crimes
According to the FBI, “Violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses that involve force or threat of force. Property crime includes the offenses of burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. The object of the theft-type offenses is the taking of money or property, but there is no force or threat of force against the victims.”
Alarms says that they computed the total number of crimes reported by each city by adding violent crimes and property crimes. Then they created a crime rate as the number of crimes per 1,000 population.
After that they transformed the total crime rate variable so that the skewness was reduced and normalized.
The data from 2,831 law enforcement agencies was then collected to determine police adequacy (Total Crimes/ Number of police employees). They considered that the smaller the police adequacy statistic is, the safer the city is. This variable was also transformed and normalized.
Finally, they say that they combined the two variables to create a safety score for each city.
According to Alarms study, they claim that violent crimes in Wyoming dropped by 17% between 2016-2018. Wyoming’s overall crime rate per 1k residents is listed at 22.71.
The Cheyenne Police Department announced in late January that their goal of reducing property crime in Cheyenne was met. They say that there was a decrease in property crimes by a total of 22 % for the year 2019. The department had 2,653 property crimes reported in 2018 and that has been reduced to 2,069 property crimes in 2019, all this despite an increasing population.
One of the programs that CPD says has helped with the decrease in property crimes in Cheyenne has been their The “Lock It Or Lose It” Campaign, which was used to help remind citizens and visitors to lock their doors and secure their valuables.
