A citywide fatal-crash or homicide rate does not describe the safety of a university campus. It does describe part of the community around it. This historical analysis placed U.S. towns with substantial student populations into two interactive tables using fatal-crash and homicide measures. The events counted occurred within city limits, not necessarily on or near campus, and the tables should not be read as a forecast for an individual student.
What the published tables show
In the higher-score table, Monroe, Louisiana, appears first with a displayed score of 457, followed by Youngstown, Ohio, at 385 and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at 337. Baton Rouge has the largest five-year fatal-crash count among the 25 displayed entries, at 263. Daytona Beach, Florida, has the largest displayed annual fatal-crash rate, at 28.85 per 100,000 residents. North Carolina and Ohio each have three cities in this displayed top 25. These are descriptions of the embedded table, not independent verification of the underlying federal records or scoring formula.
The lower-score table places Provo, Utah, first. It displays zero murders in its three-year count and an annual fatal-crash rate of 4.06 per 100,000 residents. A low composite score still does not mean that every route, neighborhood, or period is equally safe.
How to read a citywide ranking
The tables combine five-year fatal-crash totals and annualized rates with three-year murder and nonnegligent-manslaughter totals and rates. Counts and rates answer different questions. A larger city can have more events while a smaller city has a higher rate. The displayed “Deadly Score” is a composite; without its calculation workbook, it should not be treated as a standard government safety measure.
The original article gave conflicting eligibility thresholds and described institutions that do not consistently fit its stated four-year-college rule. The original city-level source extract, the specific years used for each measure, the complete list of excluded cities, and the scoring workbook were not available for this review. Those materials are needed to reproduce the rankings or independently confirm whether each city qualified. Until that audit is complete, the tables are best viewed as the firm’s historical exploratory analysis, with the numbers reported as shown in the embedded visualizations.
Students, families, and residents making practical decisions should look beyond one composite. Routes to campus, street design, traffic speed, nighttime travel, housing location, and current local conditions can matter more to a particular person. Our Baton Rouge car accident practice page addresses the legal issues that arise after a crash. A separate article examines Louisiana holiday crash trends using a different question and time period; neither study predicts an individual’s experience.
Sources and limitations
The historical study cited IPEDS for institutions, the U.S. Census Bureau for population and student share, and FBI Uniform Crime Reporting for murders and nonnegligent manslaughters. The embedded tables describe fatal-crash measures as NHTSA data. These public portals identify the source agencies, but this article does not provide a downloadable, row-level source file or the formula behind the displayed score. Comparing current crime or crash conditions with these historical figures requires a fresh dataset and consistent boundaries.
If citing this analysis, link to this page and make clear that the figures are historical citywide measures from the displayed tables. Do not describe a rank as a measure of incidents on a campus or as a current safety guarantee.