Another internet ranking came out last week and, once again, Bridgeport fared extremely well in the standings. In the latest edition of Movoto.com’s “10 Safest Places in West Virginia” list, Bridgeport made the cut.

 

Bridgeport was ranked No. 9 in the poll by the Web site. The Web site is a online real estate Web site that aims to make the real estate process an easier venture.

 

Another city from North Central West Virginia earned the top spot. The City of Weston in Lewis County was listed as the safest city in the Mountain State.

 

The rankings, it should be noted, aren’t done randomly. In fact, the basis of the study done by Movoto was the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. The Web site used date from 2013 when doing the rankings of all municipalities in West Virginia with more than 3,000 residents.

 

“I think the fact that they used the FBI’s numbers, which are almost certainly 100 percent accurate, that you can certainly put stock in this study,” said Bridgeport City Clerk Andrea Kerr. “As a resident and a person that works in Bridgeport this helps me feel safer knowing that the FBI numbers show Bridgeport as one of the safest places to live.”

 

The Movoto study used several categories out of the FBI report for their analysis. The areas for the student were murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, thefts and vehicle thefts. From those groups, the crimes were divided into the category of murders, violent crimes, property crimes and total crimes.

 

“Once we omitted any places that did not report data that year, we were left with a total of 27 locations. We calculated the crimes per person in each of these places, in order to fairly compare cities with both large and small populations. We ranked each place with a score from one to 27 in each category, where the lower scores were the safer places,” the Web site stated. “In our analysis, we gave more weight to murders, violent crimes, and property crimes (they accounted for 30 percent of the overall score) and less to total number of crimes (just 10 percent) in order to take into account the differing severity of crimes.”

 

Kerr said continually seeing Bridgeport land in the top 10 of these various rankings by Movoto and other on-line groups, such as Nerdwalltet.com, is a sign that things are going well in Bridgeport.

 

“Those are significant categories where they base their ratings,” said Kerr. “The metrics used for this speak highly for Bridgeport being in the top 10.”

 

To see the entire list of rankings, click HERE.