A national real estate firm doing business in more than 30 states released a list earlier this week of West Virginia’s safest cities to live in. Although not taking the top spot, Bridgeport was near the top of the list.

 

Movoto.com, an online real estate brokerage firm based in San Mateo, CA, put together the rankings. In March of this year, Bridgeport was ranked as the best city in West Virginia in which to live. In this new category, Bridgeport was ranked as the fourth safest city in the Mountain State. Weston earned the top spot in the rankings.

 

“Certainly, it’s good news for the City of Bridgeport to receive a designation such as this,” said City Clerk Andrea Kerr. “From a safety standpoint, our emergency services personnel work extremely hard to protect our citizens, our businesses and their property. I believe this is a great bit of recognition for those individuals, which shows that they’re doing their job.”

 

For those thinking there’s no method to the selection process, they would be wrong.

 

The list is based on population and cities with less than 3,000 residents were not included. From there, Movoto used the FBI’s 2012 Uniform Crime Report. After the smaller cities were moved and cities that didn’t report date to the UCR couldn’t be included, there were 27 cities that were ranked.

 

The data that was used to shape the rankings included crimes related to murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, theft and vehicle theft. Movoto took those crimes and put them into four groups – murder, violent crimes, property crimes, and total crimes.

 

After that, the Web site used a formula to ranking the cities one through 27. The lower the number, per the formula, the safer the city was determined to be. The key factor benefitting Bridgeport was a low number of violent crimes.

 

Click HERE to read the story and remember the formula Movoto used is based on each city having 100,000 residents. Because of that, the numbers of some crimes in each city will seem much larger than reality. They explain their formula in the story.