Alaska today might not be the neighborly, we’re-all-in-this-together place it once was, but look at the good side: It could be worse.
Or at least that’s what the data crunchers at WalletHub have concluded after ranking “The Safest States in America (2024).”
“With every new headline about a mass shooting, terrorist attack, hate crime or natural disaster,” WalletHub says, “many of us fear for our safety and that of our loved ones. Americans have to worry about their financial safety as well, as the government continues to work on slowing down inflation.
“Certain states keep their residents safer than others. In order to determine the safest states in America, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 52 key safety indicators grouped into five different categories. Our data set ranges from assaults per capita to the total loss amount from climate disasters per capita to the unemployment rate.”
Alaska did come out a lot better in this report than in a U.S. News and World Report of the “Most Dangerous States” in May and a 2024 list of the same compiled by Data Pandas. The latter ranked Alaska as the second most dangerous state in the nation, but offered no information on what metrics it used to arrive at a conclusion which put the 49th state between Louisiana at number one and New Mexico at number three.
Louisiana and New Mexico are annually among the national leaders in murder rates. The Louisana homicide rate of 19.8 per 100,000 residents in 2022 was almost twice the Alaska rate of 10.2 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control, which has yet to compile complete 2023 numbers. New Mexico was at 14.5 per 100,000 that year with Mississippi leading the nation at 20.7.
The U.S. News & World report that came out in May put Alaska in the top 10 most dangerous at number seven, but that ranking was based solely on the rates of violent and property crime. The latter a measure of “danger” can only be described as odd. A high rate of property crime makes a state a less pleasant place in which to live, but by definition, property crimes aren’t dangerous.
The WalletHub ranking looked at not just violent crimes – murder, mansalughter, rape, assault – but at financial stability, road safety and more.
The upside
Alaska is lucky in that it has managed to avoid terrorism attacks and gone a long time between mass shootings, which entered into the WalletHub calculations, but the state was below the midpoint on a lot of other “key safety indicators.”
The state’s overall score was, however, pulled up by WalletHub’s conclusion that Alaska is the national leader in “emergency preparedness.” Clearly there is some benefit to being regularly pounded by the weather, given that the best emergency preparedness training is gained through experience with emergencies.
After a winter in which Anchorage struggled to dig itself out after assaults from snowstorm after snowstorm and the frozen ruts in the roads got so bad some residents of the state’s urban core were complaining their cars were being destroyed, there might, however, be those who would argue with this ranking.
But to number crunchers in Washington, D.C., where WalletHub is based, it obviously looked like the state was doing well in this category though not so in others.
Given petty theft problems not only in Anchorage but out on the edges of the Anchorage Metropolitan Area in Palmer and Wasilla, most residents of the state’s urban core home to most of the state’s population, will likely find themselves in agreement with WalletHub’s conclusion on “personal and residential safety” in Alaska. It put Alaska second to last in the nation. Only Nevada scored worse, probably due to the weight given mass shootings and terrorist attacks.
Alaska hasn’t had a mass shooting since 1997 in Bethel, and it’s never had a terrorist attack. Nevada authorities claim to have thwarted a terrorist attack there in 2023, and the state witnessed a mass shooting at the University of Nevada Las Vegas last year.
Nevada also shares some of Alaska’s other violent crime problems.
Rapes, murders & sex offenders
Both states rank high on the lists of forcible rapes (Alaska is first, Nevada is seventh), plus murders and non-negligent manslaughter combined (Alaska is eighth, Nevada is 20th). These categories, along with the number of registered sex offenders (Alaska was 16th in the nation) were double-weighted in the WalletHub scoring.
Washington, D.C. is far and away the national leader in murders and non-negligent manslaughters but was not included in the WalletHub analysis. The combined, per-capita rate of death in D.C. was 29.3 per 100,000 in 2022 – almost five times the national average of 6.3 at the time and more than three times the Alaska’s then rate of 9.5, according to the data-tracking website Statista.
“The District of Columbia has some of the strongest gun laws in the country and leads the nation with a strong background check law. The District has enacted new gun safety legislation like an Extreme Risk law and emergency ghost gun legislation,” according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control advocacy group.
The safest state on the WalletHub list – Vermont – is an open-carry state with minimal gun control laws. Purchases are limited to adults and background checks are required, and that’s about it. Still, the state has a homicide rate of 3.4 per 100,000, according to Statista. The rate in neighboring Massachusetts, a state with stringent gun control laws, is, however, even lower at 2.1 per 100,000.
On the other hand, Utah – which “lacks every foundational gun violence prevention law,” according to Everytown – has a rate of 2.0 per 100,000.
Highly rated Vermont is also short on law enforcement personnel. It ranks 48th per capita in that category, according to WalletHub’s ranking. SafeHome, however, lists Vermont at 39th with 2.93 officers per 1,000 residents. Whichever the case, it has a lot less law enforcement than New Jersey – tied with Wyoming and Louisana for number one on the WalletHub list.
Safehome has Wyoming lower, but both lists report Louisiana as the nation’s biggest employer of law enforcement officers with SafeHome reporting 4.78 officers per 100,000. And yet, that state has the nation’s highest combined rate of murders and non-negligent manslaughters, according to WalletHub.
The website puts Louisana’s combined rate at 16.8 deaths per 100,000 residents or about 55 percent of the D.C. rate of 29.3.
New Mexico – which had the nation’s second highest state rate for murders and non-negligent manslaughters in 2022, according to Statista – and led U.S. News’ list of the most dangerous states for 2024 also has a lot of law enforcement. SafeHome reported 4.76 officers per 1,000 residents there.
The state with the fewest officers, according to SafeHome, is Washington with 2.21 per 1,000 or less than half the number of Louisiana and New Mexico. Washington also happens to have a below-average rate of murders and non-negligent manslaughter deaths at 5 per 100,000.
And then, again, there is Utah with 2.22 officers per 100,000 – the second lowest, according to SafeHome – and the fourth lowest homicide rate in the country.
The only states with homicide rates lower than Utah are New Hampshire, Iowa and Rhode Island, in that order, and all have low numbers of law enforcement officers. Rhode Island is the 11th lowest on the SafeHome list at 2.90 officers per 1,000. New Hampshire is just below it at 2.81. And Iowa falls all the way to fourth lowest at 2.64.
Safety, it would appear, cannot be guaranteed by simply increasing the number of police, and it might be an equally hard thing to quantify.
On-the-job deaths
WalletHub, for instance, ranks Alaska 13th for “workplace safety and risk” even though the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports “commercial fishing remains a high-risk occupation” in the 49th state, and the AFL-CIO’s 2023 report on “Death on the Job” puts Alaska overall at number five for deaths behind Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana and Louisiana.
On-the-job injuries and fatalities in the 49th state do, however, vary greatly from year to year, and thus a snapshot of any one year could be no more than a pleasant scene in a movie just before an explosion kills everyone.
WalletHub’s report for 2024 also ranks Alaska 36th for road safety despite the fact that with the year not yet over Anchorage is on the way to a record number of pedestrian deaths, and the National Safety Council is reporting that as of the end of July, motor vehicle deaths of all types in the state were up 16 percent over 2023.
All of which sort of underlines the problem with these year-to-year rankings of anything.
Alaska might be in the middle of the WalletHub list today, but it could be at the bottom – or top – tomorrow. And if you live in Anchorage or Fairbanks or Juneau or anywhere else in the 49th state, you might well have a better feel for what was, what is and what might be in your part of the state than any number cruncher working for any website anywhere.
All of which might also be something to keep in mind if you’re contemplating a move. What a state or city looked like yesterday or yesteryear might not be what it looks like tomorrow or next year.
