That’s because Big D held down the bottom in a new ranking of the safest American cities by the personal finance company WalletHub. Of 182 cities, we limped in at No. 165.
Published on Monday, WalletHub’s “Safest Cities in America (2023)” list scored metros across more than 40 key metrics within three broader dimensions: home and community safety, natural-disaster risk and financial safety.
Threats aside from flat-out crime include traffic deaths, the share of the uninsured population and the unemployment rate. Experts analyzed data gathered from a wide range of entities, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, the FBI, the Gun Violence Archive and more.
Johnson has made it exceedingly clear that he’s a law-and-order mayor. He even referenced his safety ambitions in the Sept. 22 Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing his decision to bolt to the Republican Party.
After news broke of Johnson’s political switch, Dallas City Council member Adam Bazaldua told the Observer that the “GOP is the leading party in disingenuous messaging, and this started in 2020 with a false narrative to the public that his colleagues on the council were trying to defund the police, when in all reality, he also is quick to tout being the safest large city in the country, and that was done under the watch of a Democrat majority council.”
Source: WalletHub
Whether the mayor’s messaging is disingenuous or not, it has clearly been effective. A recent Gallup poll indicates that nearly three-quarters of Americans view Dallas as safe, putting the city first among 16 cities in a ranking of perceived safety. Boston came in a close second.
Johnson promoted the Gallup poll during a Fox News appearance in August, also writing in a post on his Medium account that month: “Dallas is a great city because it is a safe city.”
Oh?
Unfortunately for Johnson, it turns out that the idea of a super-duper-secure Dallas might be a tad bit off-base.
Other Texas cities ranked higher than Dallas for overall safety: Houston (No. 151), Austin (No. 139) and El Paso (No. 125).
WalletHub’s home and community safety category considered measures such as mass shootings, murders, assaults and forcible rapes, in addition to drug poisoning deaths and traffic fatalities. Certain (cough, Democrat-led) major metros fared better than Dallas in this realm, such as New York City (No. 145) and San Francisco (No. 157). We lagged behind, coming in 168th place.
"There's still a lot of room for improvement." – Jill Gonzalez, WalletHub
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WalletHub senior analyst Jill Gonzalez put it this way when speaking with the Observer: “That would mean that there's still a lot of room for improvement in terms of everything from assaults per capita, thefts per capita, to maybe needing more active firefighters, EMTs, paramedics per capita.”
Crime aside, the Dallas area has also seen a spike in its natural-disaster risk over the past few years, particularly when it comes to flooding, Gonzalez said. She noted that Texas’ faulty power grid puts us at a higher risk, too.
And Dallas is home to the fifth-highest uninsured population in the country, a major ding against its financial safety ranking, according to WalletHub.
Dallas’ overall safety levels haven’t seemed to improve that much over the past dozen or so months. Last year, we were No. 166 of 180 on WalletHub’s safest-cities list, the Oak Cliff Advocate reported at the time.
Some social media users have cast doubt on Johnson’s recent Big D safety claims.
Yonah Freemark, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, shared the aforementioned WSJ article in a Sept. 22 post on X (formerly Twitter).
“Dallas mayor, heralding his success in convincing Americans that Dallas is the safest major US city (Dallas's murder rate is actually [greater than] 3x New York City's...), becomes a Republican,” Freemark wrote.
Dallas mayor, heralding his success in convincing Americans that Dallas is the safest major US city (Dallas's murder rate is actually >3x New York City's...), becomes a Republican. He will join 2 other Republicans among top 30 US city mayors. https://t.co/exUOGKJH98
— Yonah Freemark (@yfreemark) September 22, 2023
The Observer reached out to Johnson’s office for comment on the WalletHub ranking but didn’t receive a response before publication time. He has, however, continued to give his friends at Fox News some of his time.
In an interview that aired last week, Johnson explained to FOX & Friends why he thinks that cities need more Republican mayors. “We can't afford to let the cities look like they look right now,” he said. “From San Francisco to Chicago to Philadelphia to D.C., the news is filled every day with all this out-of-control, lawless behavior … it's a culture of lawlessness.”
Given that both Chicago and San Fran ranked higher than Dallas on WalletHub’s list, perhaps the mayor would do well to invest in a mirror.
