Report: Woodstock 9th Safest Place in Georgia

Woodstock residents don’t have to worry too much about crime becoming a problem in their city.

That’s according to Movoto, a real estate blog that ranked the city as the one of the safest places in the Peach State.

Woodstock came in ninth place, lower than the city of Canton’s third place ranking.

The blog compiled its 10 Safest Places in Georgia list by first naming the biggest places in the state that have over 10,000 people. It then gathered data from the2012 FBI Uniform Crime Report in the categories of murder, rape, robbery, assault, theft, burglary and vehicle theft.

Those crimes were then divided into four categories: murders, property crimes, violent crimes and total crimes. Movoto omitted places that did not have crime data, which left it with 73 places to work with.

After that task was completed, Movoto found crime rates for each place per 100,000 people “in order to fairly compare big and small places against each other,” the company said. The next step was to rank each place in each category from one to 73. Scores closest to one were deemed the safest

“Finally, we scored each category so that murders, violent crimes, and property crimes accounted for 30 percent of the overall score, where total crimes made up 10 (percent),” Movoto stated.

It also averaged the adjusted rankings into one overall Big Deal Score, where the lowest score was our safest place.

The top 10 list includes:

1. Johns Creek

2. Acworth

3. Canton

4. Kennesaw

5. Grovetown

6. Duluth

7. Suwanee

8. Dallas

9. Woodstock

10. Loganville

Woodstock, along with the city of Canton, had no murders reported in 2012, and its 170 violent crimes per 100,000 was one of the lowest rates Movoto saw in its rankings. All of this came out to Woodstock having the 14th lowest total crime.

“Though having a 1 in 38 chance of being the victim of a crime doesn’t sound very low, let’s compare that to a similarly sized place, such as Griffin, which had a one in 13 chance,” Movoto stated. ”Factor in that Griffin also had eight murders and 29 rapes per 100,000 and you can see why Woodstock placed so much higher on our list.”