It's been almost six years since I've moved out of my hometown and I was pleased to see this Associated Press article today:

[New Jersey's] Brick Township was rated the second-safest city for the third straight year [according to a company’s annual ranking based on crime statistics], behind only Newton, Mass., while the Garden State’s Dover Township was ranked tenth. The other communities in the top five were Amherst, N.Y., which had been ranked as the safest city for the past four years, followed by Mission Viejo, Calif., and Clarkstown, N.Y.

Clarkstown, NY is the "community" I am from, although there isn't exactly a city named Clarkstown, rather it's a town made up of hamlets ("cities") according to the official Clarkstown, NY website. That hamlet story is actually some new I learned today. Anyways, here's where the stats came from:

The rankings look at the rate for six crime categories: Murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft. It compares 350 cities with populations of 75,000 or more that reported crime data to the FBI. Final 2003 statistics, released by the FBI in October, were used to determine the rankings.

yay Clarkstown!