How 'Safe' Is Asbury Park? Here's Where It Ranks In NJ: Report

ASBURY PARK, NJ — New Jersey has some of the nation's lowest crime rates, but residents express the sixth-highest level of concern about safety, according to SafeWise.

But a new report from SafeWise, which contextualizes crime and safety trends, ranks New Jersey cities and towns in terms of "safety." The list includes Asbury Park, which placed last out of 244 municipalities in the rankings.

For the purposes of the report, SafeWise's uses of "dangerous" and "safe" explicitly refer to crime rates from FBI data, SafeWise says. The rankings also factor in data points like median income, high school graduation rates, redlining practices, household access to high-speed internet, city budget allocations, and unemployment rates.

Additionally, the FBI has a longstanding policy against using its crime data to rank locales.

"Data users should not rank locales because there are many factors that cause the nature and type of crime to vary from place to place," the FBI says. "UCR (uniform crime reporting) statistics include only jurisdictional population figures along with reported crime, clearance, or arrest data. Rankings ignore the uniqueness of each locale."

In the 2022 report, Asbury Park was listed as having 12.3 violent crimes per 1,000 people and 34.2 property crimes per 1,000 people. The city currently has a population of about 15,300, according to SafeWise.

In 2021, Asbury Park was ranked at No. 242 out of 244 safest municipalities.

New Jersey's violent-crime rate dropped 6 percent compared to last year, and the property-crime rate also dipped 13 percent. But New Jerseyans were 1.3 times more likely to worry about their safety on a daily basis than the previous year, according to SafeWise. Fifty-eight percent of survey participants in New Jersey reported concern on a daily basis that crime might happen to them, compared to 47 percent of Americans.

See the full SafeWise report here.