Safety in Boston can be troubling for some. Don’t get me wrong, the city has a plethora of upstanding neighborhoods and areas chock full of passionate residents. But as with any large, urban metropolis some spots aren’t so savory. There is one Massachusetts city, though, where people feel so safe walking alone at night that it was polled as one of the most secure in the entire country.
Recent polls by Gallup pertaining to health and wellness, and feelings of community, found that the quaint Cape Cod city of Barnstable was amongst national leaders in both categories. It comes as no surprise, then, that Barnstable residents consider the municipality to be amongst the safest.
According to Gallup, “Nationally, an average 70.5% of Americans in 2012-2013 felt safe walking alone in the communities they live in.”
Of our Bay State brethren surveyed in Barnstable, 82.2 percent feel safe walking home at night. Only the people living in the Holland-Grand Haven metro area of Michigan; the Fort Collins-Loveland metro area of Colorado; the Provo-Orem metro area of Utah; Honolulu, Hawaii; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and the Des Moines-West Des Moines, Iowa metro area felt free to roam the streets of their respective cities more so than in Barnstable.
Only a disconcerting 48.5 percent of residents in the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas community feel snug in their neck of the woods. Those sharing the Texas district’s unsettling sentiments live on the West Coast in Yakima, Wash.; Stockton, Calif.; Modesto, Calif.; followed by the Columbus area of Georgia and Alabama.
While the statistics indicate how residents feel about the security of the neighborhood in which they reside, Gallup notes further that they “may also be related to the age, gender, and demographic and economic composition of the metro areas, as well as security factors such as law enforcement presence and street lighting.”
To garner the data, Gallup conducted Well-Being Index interviews with at least 300 adults aged 18 and older in each of 189 metro areas over a two-year span, from January 2012 through December 2013.
