Can You Guess Which City Was Named America's Safest?

The notion of “better safe than sorry” has been taken to a municipal level in a new WalletHub study that identified the safest cities in the U.S. — along with the metropolises where safety often seems like an elusive commodity.

What Happened: WalletHub surveyed 182 cities with 44 different safety-related indicators including assaults per capita, sex crimes per capita, natural disaster risks, quality of life criteria and road quality.

As a result of this number crunch, WalletHub declared Columbia, Maryland, as the safest city in the U.S. Other cities in the list's top five rankings were South Burlington, Vermont; Nashua, New Hampshire; Yonkers, New York; and Madison, Wisconsin.

At the other end of the spectrum, St. Louis ranked last among the 182 localities to be considered as the nation’s least safe city. Joining St. Louis in the bottom five were Fort Lauderdale, Florida; San Bernardino, California; Oklahoma City; and Memphis, Tennessee.

Related Link: Can You Guess Which City Was Named America's Bedbug Capital?

What Else? Among the individual criteria for this analysis, New York City was found to have the fewest traffic fatalities per capita while Mobile, Alabama, had the highest.

New York City tied with Chicago, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., for the highest number of law enforcement employees per capita, but Irvine, California, had the lowest number.

However, Irvine had the fewest assaults per capita, while Detroit tied with Memphis, St. Louise, Birmingham and Little Rock, Arkansas, for the highest rate of assaults per capita.

In terms of financial safety, the lowest percentage of an uninsured population was found in Pearl City, Hawaii, while Brownsville, Texas, had the highest percentage. And Wichita, Kansas, had the highest share of households with emergency savings but Memphis had the lowest.