Movato Real Estate has issued its list of the ten safest mid-sized cities, and they have ranked Sunnyvale #3, behind only Glendale and Santa Clarita. The rankings seem to have been derived entirely from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, normalized to per-100k statistics. Sunnyvale scored so well because half of the ranking was attributed to the chance of a resident being a victim of a violent crime. While Sunnyvale has experienced the same property crime surge that is sweeping the state, our violent crime rate has continued to decline to very low levels, hence our high ranking as a safe city.

I always hesitate to play up these sort of accolades, because too often, the rankings are determined in a fashion that is largely arbitrary.  The most prominent of these, CQ Press, is notorious for such arbitrariness, to the point where the FBI has even published a warning on their UCR site about these sorts of comparisons.  Invariably, some list arbitrarily ranks us high, which some people then trumpet, only to be followed by a subsequent lower ranking, forcing us to explain why the rankings had no significance to begin with.

Still, this is a high ranking, so I’ll trumpet it… 🙂

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