COVINGTON, Ga. – According to the National Council for Home Safety and Security, the city of Covington ranks at No. 38 as the safest city in Georgia for 2019. 

“To identify the safest cities in Georgia, we reviewed the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics,” according to the Alarm.com report. “A total of 7,639 cities were factored into this ranking with populations ranging from 7,639 to 4,007,147. However, we eliminated any cities that failed to submit a complete crime report to the FBI and removed cities with populations under 10,000.”

According to the report, Covington tallied 69 violent crimes and 813 property crimes. The city ranks behind Atlanta, Conyers and Loganville, but ahead of Statesboro, Athens and McDonough. 

“Overall, data from 8,793 law enforcement agencies that represented more 193 million of the U.S. population helped us draw interesting insights between the size of the police force and incidence of crime,” according to the report. 

Georgia’s median per capita income is in the range of $50,000-60,000, which falls in line with the national averages. Despire the economic wealth, the state’s crime averages continue to be at – or above – national levels, according to the report. 

It is the 42nd safest state for property crime (where first means lowest crime). Georgia has a violent crime rate significantly above the national average with a ratio of 1.25 based upon 4.33 violent crimes per 1,000 versus the national average figure of 3.47. Property crime is marginally below national levels at 39.23 against the national level of 40.43 – giving a ratio of 0.97.

“There are two broad classifications of crimes: violent crimes and non-violent crimes,” according to the report. “According to the FBI, ‘Violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses that involve force or threat of force. Property crime includes the offenses of burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. The object of the theft-type offenses is the taking of money or property, but there is no force or threat of force against the victims.’

“We computed the total number of crimes reported by each city by adding violent crimes and property crimes. We then rated them using the population of the city and created a crime rate as the number of crimes per 1,000 population. Then we transformed the total crime rate variable so that the skewness was reduced and we normalized it so the final number became a score between 0 and 1.

“Next, we computed a new variable called Police Adequacy (TotalCrimes / Number of police employees). We consider that the smaller the police adequacy statistic is, the safer the city is. We transformed and normalized this police adequacy variable also, resulting in a score between 0 and 1. Finally, we combined the two scores to create a safety score for each city.”

The five safest cities in Georgia, according to the report, are Holly Springs, Braselton, Milton, Johns Creek and Kennesaw.