Every year, SafeWise releases a list of “Louisiana’s safest cities.” It sounds reassuring — until you realize that more than three-quarters of Louisiana’s cities aren’t even part of the data they use. On the surface, it looks authoritative, providing rankings based on FBI crime data, expressed in neat per-capita rates. However, a closer look at Louisiana reveals that the lists are more illusion than insight. In actuality, those cities that are featured may not be as safe as you think.
Most Louisiana Cities Don’t Even Show Up
Louisiana has 304 incorporated municipalities. Yet in 2023, only 69 (22.6%) of them reported to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the FBI’s national crime database. Additionally, SafeWise employs a population cut-off that excludes over half the municipalities that report from even being considered. That means more than three-quarters of the state’s towns, villages, and cities are not represented in the very dataset SafeWise relies on.
The gap is even more striking at the top. Of the 30 largest municipalities in Louisiana, 18 (60%) do not report to NIBRS at all. These are not remote villages — they’re major population centers where large portions of Louisiana’s citizens live, such as New Orleans, Shreveport, and Metairie. SafeWise cannot include them because they didn’t report data to NIBRS.
In Acadiana, this problem also exists. The City of Lafayette, one of Louisiana’s largest cities, is absent from the 2023 NIBRS reporting, although it became certified to report data in 2024. The same is true for many of the suburbs in Lafayette Parish. Scott and Carencro also became Louisiana Incident-Based Reporting System (LIBRS) certified in 2024, meaning they are also absent from the 2023 data relied on by SafeWise for its 2025 rankings. The only municipality in Lafayette Parish that shows up in the SafeWise dataset is Broussard, and it was highlighted as “one of the safest” — but its inclusion has less to do with being uniquely safe and more to do with the fact that it reports. As for Youngsville, they are the only city in the parish that is neither LIBRS nor NIBRS certified.
Then They Exclude Half of What’s Left
Even among the 69 municipalities that do report, SafeWise applies an additional filter. Only those with populations above the state median are eligible to be included in their report. In Louisiana, that cutoff is 4,848.5 residents.
This instantly excludes all villages (≤ 1,000 residents) and most towns (1,001–4,999 residents), no matter how safe they are. In fact, several small towns — Chataignier, Evergreen, Fisher, Ida, and Montpelier — had zero reportable offenses in 2023, but none qualify because they’re “too small.”
When you combine non-reporting agencies with the population cutoff, the SafeWise rankings shrink to a narrow slice of mid-sized, self-reporting cities. Broussard, for example, makes the “safest cities” list, but it isn’t even one of Louisiana’s 30 most populous municipalities. And in the 2023 Top 10, not a single city ranked is among Louisiana’s 30 most populous.
Only 34 (49.2%) of the 69 municipalities reviewed by SafeWise are included in the data. Alternatively, one can view this as only 34 (11.1%) of the 304 municipalities in Louisiana are included in the data.
Back to Acadiana
For Acadiana, that means Lafayette and its largest suburbs don’t appear at all. The community is represented only by Broussard, while larger neighbors, such as Youngsville and the cities of Scott and Carencro, are absent from the record. This gives the illusion of precision, but in reality, it’s an incomplete and misleading picture. So when a KLFY headline declares that Broussard is ‘one of Louisiana’s safest cities,’ the real story isn’t that Broussard is safer — it’s that Lafayette, Youngsville, Scott, and Carencro aren’t counted.
We are loudly told that crime in New Orleans is dropping, but how do we know this? It certainly isn’t based on LIBRS or NIBRS data. Neither the City of New Orleans nor the Parish of Orleans is reporting data to either system. In this case, the absence of data may be the only evidence that there are lower crime reports. After all, if you stop reporting, crime appears to vanish. But only on paper.
It’s Marketing, Not Measurement
The bottom line is that SafeWise is a private company that markets home security products. Its lists serve a dual purpose: drawing attention to safety concerns while steering readers toward purchasing alarm systems. Without noting the gaping data holes, they risk misleading the public about where Louisiana is actually safest.
That may not seem like a problem until policymakers and journalists treat these lists as hard facts. We have seen both scenarios over the years. Youngsville, when they still reported data, held tight to the title of being one of the top ten safest cities in Louisiana according to SafeWise. Their failure to report has now allowed the City of Broussard to lay claim to the bogus title.
Ultimately, the rankings published by SafeWise ARE NOT an index of Louisiana’s safest cities. They’re a ranking of which mid-sized municipalities both report to the FBI, clear an arbitrary population threshold, and other factors. Everyone else is left out. Acadiana illustrates the flaw in this approach: Lafayette, Youngsville, Scott, and Carencro are omitted, while only Broussard is included on the list. For an accurate picture of public safety, one must look past SafeWise’s glossy lists and confront the reality: SafeWise’s lists don’t measure safety. They measure reporting. Until Louisiana fixes its broken crime-data system, any city-by-city comparison is little more than marketing wrapped in math.
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