Increased criminal activity and gun violence in Frisco raises the question: Does Frisco remain the safest city in the US with its ever growing population?
According to the website Safewise, Frisco places 36th on the safest city scale just in Texas without even counting the other cities in the entire country. The people working on Safewise explained that they calculate, pick and curate their lists of safest cities by taking account of the crime rate, population and more which are reported by the FBI.
“We also use population thresholds for each state. Using population data (as reported to the FBI), we identify the median city population for all cities that reported to the FBI in each state,” a reporter on safewise stated. “We report only on cities with populations above this median for each state. This reduces the risk of outliers and lowers the likelihood of an extreme outlier skewing the data.”
They also use the system in which they calculate the crime rate with the ratio of the number of crimes per 1000 people. Using this extensive system, safewise has declared ‘Trophy Club’ the safest city in Texas in 2023, with a population of 13,205 and violent crime rate of 0.1 and property crime rate at 4.6. Of course, this system wouldn’t work if population count was used to fairly judge each city and its competitor. There isn’t even a comparison between Frisco and Trophy Club. Frisco has a population of 210,000+ whereas Trophy Club has a population of 13,000+ so of course, logistically, Trophy Club would be considered safer due to a vastly lower population.
Considering these details, Officer Jared Hudson, SRO at Lebanon Trail, who has been with the Frisco police department for 4 years backs up the claim that Frisco remains the safest city in the nation.
“I think statistically as far as crime rates are being reported, [Frisco] is the safest city in the nation, now obviously that’s per capita, so that’s based on population and the number of crimes,” Hudson said.
Although we see multiple posts of multiple serious crimes on social media once in a while, it doesn’t necessarily prove that Frisco isn’t ‘safe’ anymore.
“Keep in mind that just because you see something major happening on Facebook, doesn’t mean that the city’s not safe anymore. I think things are just more open now than they used to be. Every city’s going to have crime no matter where you go,” Officer Hudson said.
Further verifying Frisco’s safety, Smartassets reports Frisco as the # 1 safest city in the entirety of the US. They came to this conclusion by assessing mostly the same things that Safewise was looking for, crime rates, population, etc. But it’s important to note that this website counted the cities with the largest population making it a more even comparison since the cities with huge populations wouldn’t be compared to cities with populations of 10,000.
A reporter on Smartassests writes, “Frisco ranks No. 1 for safety for the second year in a row. Located in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Frisco has the fourth-lowest violent crime rate (95 crimes for every 100,000 residents) and the sixth-lowest property crime rate (901 for every 100,000 residents). Frisco and the surrounding area also averaged eight drug poisoning deaths per 100,000 residents in 2022, which ranked fourth-lowest across our study.”
Other patterns that Officer Hudson has noticed while working at the Frisco Police Department, although property crime rates are the 6th lowest in Frisco, most reported crimes include numerous property crimes, such as vehicle burglaries but, supporting the data by Smartassets, very low rates of violent crimes.
“There’s a lot of property crimes, as far as vehicle burglaries, thefts, etcetera. But the police department has a great plan in place to prevent those,” Hudson said. “We’re combatting what we have and as far as violent crimes, they are extremely, extremely rare in Frisco.”
Now that we’ve established that safety in Frisco hasn’t deteriorated as much as many people may assume it has, there’s still the influx of people moving into Frisco, increasing the population greatly, which in turn would affect criminal activity in Frisco.
“So I think it would be naive to say that crime won’t trend up with a bigger population. That’s just kind of the way it works, but again that comes down to proactivity from your police force and your community,” Hudson said. “You can keep crime low if you stay on top of the trends and as soon as you see a trend start emerging, put a plan in place to solve that trend. But I do think that with a rising population as long as people are vigilant and report things they see, report suspicious activity, even if it ends up being nothing, it ends up getting us in those areas, to try to help solve those issues”
In conclusion, as we can see, taking into account Frisco’s population, advancements, police department, and the effort the department puts into making the city a safe place to live in, Frisco can be considered one of the safest cities in the USA.
“The people that live in Frisco and they go to school in Frisco are extremely blessed with low crime and a great police force, that when crime trends do start to appear, no matter where you are, [the police force] puts plans in place to address them.”
