Newton, Massachusetts is back! After years of finishing among the top five cities, Newton at last has reclaimed first place honors as America’s Safest City.... Newton, Massachusetts is back! After years of finishing among the top five cities, Newton at last has reclaimed first place honors as America’s Safest City. Newton last won the award in 1999. The announcement will appear in the new edition of City Crime Rankings, an annual reference book of crime statistics and rankings slated for publication in December. The results of the 11th annual Safest City Award were announced today by Morgan Quitno Press, a Lawrence, Kansas-based publishing and research company. At the opposite end of the crime scale, Camden, New Jersey ranked as the nation’s most dangerous city.

“Newton has an outstanding record when it comes to fighting crime, “said Scott Morgan, President of Morgan Quitno Press. “It reported no murders and boasts some of the lowest rates among cities for rape, robbery and motor vehicle theft.”

The Morgan Quitno Safest City Award is based on a city’s rate for six basic crime categories: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft. All cities of 75,000+ populations that reported crime data to the FBI for the six crime categories were included in the rankings. In this year’s survey, 354 cities were considered for the award. Final 2003 statistics, released by the FBI on October 25, 2004, were used to determine the rankings.

Joining Newton at the top of the Safest City rankings are Brick Township, NJ; last year’s winner, Amherst, NY; Mission Viejo, CA; and Clarkstown, NY.

At the opposite end of the Morgan Quitno crime scale, Camden, New Jersey ranks as the nation’s most dangerous city. While Camden has always ranked among the 10 most dangerous cities in Morgan Quitno’s rankings, this is the first year that Camden has been named the most dangerous city. Camden is joined at the bottom of the crime rankings by (in ascending order) Detroit, MI; Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO and Gary, IN.

In addition to ranking the safety of cities, Morgan Quitno Press also examined crime in metropolitan areas. In those rankings, Appleton, WI was this year’s Safest Metropolitan Area. The Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, MI metropolitan division ranked as the most dangerous.