“Dangerous” lists can get sloppy fast, especially when they treat one bad year or one scary headline as the whole story of a place. This version uses a narrower lens. MoneyGeek’s latest small-city analysis looked at 1,061 U.S. places with populations between 30,000 and 100,000, using 2023 FBI crime data and a broader cost-of-crime model that includes both violent and property crime.
Its main takeaway was not that small-town America is suddenly dangerous everywhere. In fact, the study says small cities and towns are usually safer than large cities and carry much lower average crime costs overall. The point is narrower than that. Some smaller places still post crime burdens that look severe even beside much larger urban areas.
That nuance matters because the FBI’s national 2024 release showed violent crime falling overall in the United States. So this is not an argument that every smaller community is moving in the wrong direction. It is a more specific claim about the places that still stood out badly in the most recent local dataset MoneyGeek used.
For readers, that makes the list more useful. It is not a sweeping verdict on small cities as a category. It is a snapshot of the places where violent crime, property crime, or the broader social cost of crime still looked unusually high for communities of this size.
1. Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Pine Bluff sits at the bottom of MoneyGeek’s small-city safety ranking. The study gives it the highest crime cost per capita in the group at $12,929, along with a violent-crime rate of 1,658 per 100,000 residents and a property-crime rate of 4,887 per 100,000. MoneyGeek explicitly identifies Pine Bluff as the least safe small city in its 2025 analysis of 2023 data.
That is what makes Pine Bluff so hard to ignore in a list like this. Its crime burden was high enough that MoneyGeek said it exceeded even a number of much larger cities. For a place in the small-city range, that is an especially severe result.
2. Gary, Indiana
Gary ranked just behind Pine Bluff in the same analysis. MoneyGeek lists Gary with a crime cost per capita of $10,371, a violent-crime rate of 898 per 100,000, and a property-crime rate of 2,828 per 100,000.
What keeps Gary this high is the combined burden rather than one outlier number alone. Violence remains serious, property crime stays elevated, and the total social cost still puts the city near the very bottom of the small-city table. In a study limited to communities between 30,000 and 100,000 residents, that finish is difficult to dismiss.
3. Petersburg, Virginia
Petersburg ranked third from the bottom in MoneyGeek’s small-city dataset. The report gives it a crime cost per capita of $9,902, with a violent-crime rate of 694 per 100,000 and a property-crime rate of 3,381 per 100,000.
The violent-crime figure is not as extreme as Monroe’s or Saginaw’s, but the broader property-crime load pushes the overall burden sharply higher. That is often how a smaller place ends up looking tougher than its size suggests. The strain is spread across daily life rather than concentrated in one category.
4. Monroe, Louisiana
Monroe ranked fourth from the bottom among the 1,061 small cities and towns MoneyGeek analyzed. It posted a crime cost per capita of $9,448, a violent-crime rate of 2,104 per 100,000, and a property-crime rate of 6,048 per 100,000.
Those are severe numbers for a smaller community, especially on the violent-crime side. When violence and property crime are both running that high, the result is a city where the public-safety burden starts to feel broad rather than isolated. Monroe does not land here because of one bad metric. It lands here because nearly all of them are rough.
5. Alexandria, Louisiana
Alexandria was another Louisiana city near the very bottom of the ranking. MoneyGeek lists it with a crime cost per capita of $8,753, a violent-crime rate of 1,972 per 100,000, and a property-crime rate of 6,394 per 100,000.
The profile is especially harsh because the property-crime side is so elevated while violent crime is also very high. That combination makes the city look less like an outlier in one category and more like a place under sustained public-safety strain. In a small-city analysis, that kind of spread matters a lot.
6. Goldsboro, North Carolina
Goldsboro also landed in the bottom tier of the small-city ranking. MoneyGeek reports a crime cost per capita of $7,935, a violent-crime rate of 1,508 per 100,000, and a property-crime rate of 6,314 per 100,000.
The property-crime figure is what makes Goldsboro especially hard to wave away. Violence is already high, but the broader day-to-day loss from theft and related offenses pushes the total burden much higher. In practical terms, the city looks like a place where crime pressure is not limited to one kind of risk.
7. Camden, New Jersey
Camden appears near the bottom of the same list with a crime cost per capita of $7,886. MoneyGeek gives it a violent-crime rate of 1,690 per 100,000 and a property-crime rate of 3,190 per 100,000.
Camden is one of the better-known names here, but the numbers still explain why it remains part of this conversation. Even in a national study limited to smaller communities, it placed among the very least safe. That says a lot about how heavy the city’s public-safety burden still looked in the 2023 FBI-based data MoneyGeek used.
8. Saginaw, Michigan
Saginaw rounds out this list with one of the highest violent-crime rates in the bottom group. MoneyGeek reports a crime cost per capita of $7,468, a violent-crime rate of 2,264 per 100,000, and a property-crime rate of 2,189 per 100,000.
The violent-crime figure is what makes Saginaw especially notable. Its property-crime rate is lower than some of the places above it, but the violence number is severe enough to keep the overall burden extremely high for a community in the small-city range. That is more than enough to keep it near the front of this discussion.
The main caveat is worth repeating. This is not an official FBI ranking of the “most dangerous small towns in America,” and it does not mean every block in these places is equally unsafe. It is a data-driven snapshot based on MoneyGeek’s analysis of 2023 FBI-reported crime for places with populations between 30,000 and 100,000.
Even with that limitation, the pattern is still clear. Small cities and towns are usually safer than big cities overall, but these communities posted crime burdens high enough to stand out sharply inside their own size category. For readers, that is the most useful takeaway.