Worcester One Of The Safest Big Cities In America: Ranking

WORCESTER, MA — Coming on the heels of the city's latest homicide — a 19-year-old was shot on Friday and later died — Worcester has been ranked one of the top 30 safest big cities in the U.S., beating out other large New England cities like Boston, Providence, and New Haven.

The new ranking comes from the personal finance website WalletHub, which uses data to create various rankings of cities. For this list, the company looked at safety data in three categories: home and community safety; natural disaster risk; and financial safety.

Worcester scored best — No. 17 nationwide — for natural disaster risk. Worcester also has the third-lowest share of residents without health insurance.

The city fared less well in the other two categories. The city was ranked No. 44 for home and community safety, a category that includes data on things like terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and the number of police officers. Worcester ranked No. 55 for financial safety, which includes the unemployment rate, identity theft complaints, and bankruptcy filings, among others.

Here's how Worcester ranked compared to other New England cities for safety, according to WalletHub. The numbers reflect each city's overall ranking among the 182 on the list:

• No. 5 — South Burlington, Vermont
• No. 8 — Nashua, New Hampshire
• No. 10 — Warwick, Rhode Island
• No. 14 — Burlington, Vermont
• No. 19 — Lewiston, Maine
• No. 26 — Worcester, Massachusetts
• No. 31 — Portland, Maine
• No. 51 — Manchester, New Hampshire
• No. 72 — Bridgeport, Connecticut
• No. 77 — Providence, Rhode Island
• No. 97 — New Haven, Connecticut
• No. 99 — Boston