The Top 20 Safest Places to Live in Illinois: Report

Half of the towns listed on Niche.com's latest "Safest Places to Live" list are not in the Chicago suburbs. In fact, some of them you may have never heard of. While others, like Prairie Grove in McHenry County, and the affluent villages of Barrington and Barrington Hills, have long got nods of approval from suburbanites as being excellent places to raise a family.

Niche.com, a website that provides analysis and reports on the best (and worst) places to live or send your kids to school, says the the safest town in Illinois is located just south of the suburbs. In its recent rankings, Niche said Diamond, a small town about 24 miles southwest of Joliet, is the safest place to live in the state. Coming in second was New Baden, another small town that is located about 30 miles directly east of St. Louis, Missouri. The safest suburb to make the list comes in at No. 3, Bannockburn, which is located along the affluent North Shore just north of Deerfield.

Niche.com determines the safest places to live by using crimes rates for murder, assault, rape, burglary and other crime statistics from the FBI and U.S. Census, according to Niche.

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“The 2017 Safest Places ranking provides a comprehensive assessment of the overall safety in an area. This grade takes into account key indicators of a location's safety, including violent and property crime rates as well as resident reviews, in an attempt to measure an area's safety and security,” according to Niche.com. To review more about the site's methodology click here.

According to Niche.com the top 5 safest places to live in the entire United States are: 1. Roosevelt Island in New York, 2. Horse Cave in Kentucky, 3. Palmer Lake in Colorado, 4. Mayfield in Pennsylvania and 5. Thomson Township in Minnesota.

And here is the top 20 list of Niche's Best Places to Live in Illinois:

1. Diamond
2. New Baden
3. Bannockburn
4. Prairie Grove
5. Tower Lakes
6. Ladd
7. Wayne
8. Barrington Hills
9. Roodhouse
10. Onarga
11. Waterloo
12. Merrionette Park
13. Kildeer
14. Knoxville
15. Riverwoods
16. Winnebago
17. Leland Grove
18. Inverness
19. Barrington
20. Breese

Check out Niche's full 2017 Safest Places to Live in Illinois list here

The Niche.com report comes shortly after WalletHub, a personal finance and data service, ranked Illinois among the bottom half of its safest states. Illinois was ranked No. 26 on WalletHub's 2017 Safest States list.

To determine the nation's safest states, Wallethub compared the states across five categories: personal and residential safety, financial safety, road safety, workplace safety and emergency preparedness. The categories were given a weight fore importance ranging from personal and residential safety to emergency preparedness.

Illinois came in at No. 2 in the nation for its "Road Safety Rank," but its "Financial Safety Rank" was among the lowest at No. 4o. WalletHub gave Illinois a No. 2 ranking for "Personal and Residential Safety," a No. 33 for "Emergency Preparedness," and listed the state at No. 28 for "Workplace Safety."