A new national safety ranking delivered a gut check to Tennessee’s two biggest cities on Monday, dropping Nashville and Memphis into the bottom 10 of large U.S. cities for overall safety. Out of 83 cities examined, Nashville was clustered near the back of the pack and Memphis landed in last place. Instead of looking only at homicides or arrest counts, the report folds crime, traffic deaths and public health risks into a single score.
Study Method and Metrics
The analysis compared 83 U.S. cities and built a composite safety score from five per-capita measures: violent crime, property crime, fatal traffic crashes, drug-overdose deaths and excessive drinking, according to SmartAsset. To build those indicators, the study pulls from FBI crime statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention traffic-fatality data and FEMA's National Risk Index in places where city-level numbers are available.
How Nashville and Memphis Compare
In the final tally, Nashville ranked 76th and Memphis 83rd among the 83 large cities in the study. As reported by WSMV, Nashville’s violent-crime rate was listed at 0.0114 per capita and its property-crime rate at 0.0459 per capita. Memphis, by comparison, came in with a violent-crime rate of 0.0616 per capita and a property-crime rate of 0.1286 per capita. Those wide gaps in per-capita crime help explain why both Tennessee cities sank into the study’s bottom tier.
Why Memphis Scored Lowest
SmartAsset pointed to “high crime and motor vehicle fatality rates,” along with a “relatively high” FEMA disaster-risk rating, as the combination that dragged Memphis to the bottom of the list. Because the ranking blends several public-health and infrastructure factors, weakness in one area, such as elevated traffic deaths or overdose numbers, can weigh heavily on a city’s overall score even if other indicators are improving.
Local Context and Trends
The composite results line up with federal and local data that have shown Memphis among the U.S. cities with very high violent-crime rates in recent years, while Nashville’s trajectory has been more up-and-down, with some declines in certain categories. The nationwide release of 2024 reported-crime statistics provides the baseline data many analysts rely on, according to FBI, and local coverage from outlets like WSMV has tracked year-to-year shifts in violent-crime trends.
What Comes Next For Local Leaders
Rankings like this tend to fuel long-running local arguments over policing, traffic safety and public-health spending, with different sides embracing or questioning particular parts of the methodology. No matter how the political spin plays out, the study underscores that city safety is not a one-issue problem. The numbers suggest that violence, roadway deaths and substance-use harms are intertwined, and that any serious fix will likely require coordinated work across all three fronts.
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