West Windsor Barely Misses NJ's Safest Cities

WEST WINDSOR TOWNSHIP, NJ - West Windsor Township just barely missed making the list of the 100 safest New Jersey cities, according to the National Council For Home Safety And Security's rankings on alarms.org. West Windsor was ranked No. 122.

The rankings cite data from the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Report, which features statistics from 2016 and 2017. But they eliminated cities that didn't give the FBI a complete crime report and cities with populations lower than 10,000.

The list accounts for the number of reported violent and property crimes per 1,000 people. Then they compute a variable called Police Adequacy — total crimes divided by the number of police employees. The smaller the Police Adequacy number, the safer the city, according to the methodology.

According to the data, West Windsor reported 21 violent crimes and 301 property crimes in that span. That gave West Windsor a violent crime rate of 0.737 and a property crime rate of 10.563.

The list ranks 240 New Jersey cities. You can view the list or search any city. Click here for the full rankings and data. The "top five safest areas in New Jersey" on the study were:

• River Vale Township
• Warren Township
• Washington Township, Morris County
• Ringwood
• Tenafly

Overall, the Garden State has "encouraging" crime statistics, researchers said.

"Income levels in New Jersey are typically considerably higher than U.S. averages," researchers wrote. "Household average income at $80,000 is approximately a third higher and at $40,000 there is a similar margin for per capita income. New Jersey benefits from encouraging crime statistics, though inevitably there will be variations by localities."

According to researchers:

• New Jersey is the 3rd safest state for property crime (where 1st = lowest crime)
• New Jersey has a violent crime rate that is less than half the national average (0.45 ratio) with 1.56 crimes per 1,000 against the national average of 3.47
• Compared to national averages, property crime levels are also very low at a ratio of 0.34 based upon 13.79 crimes per 1,000 which compares to the national average of 40.43