By Carolyn Paletta
A recent report from the National Council for Home Safety and Security ranked Greenwich the seventh safest city in Connecticut.
Ridgefield was ranked the safest community in Connecticut, with only 1 violent crime and 64 property crimes counted in 2018. While Greenwich boasts one of the lowest violent crime rates in the state, with .1 violent crimes per 1000 people, its property crime rate is the highest among the top 10 safest cities, with 6.28 property crimes per 1000 people.
Lieutenant Mark Zuccerella, the head of Greenwich’s detective unit, said that property crime is consistently more common than violent crime in our town, but there are simple ways that residents can help lower the property crime rate.
“Violent crime has always been low in Greenwich, and generally when we do have violent crime the two people know one another,” Zuccerella said. “But for property crime, it’s a town that has a lot of money and a lot of nice things, and people want to come and take it. If we could just reduce leaving our cars unlocked with the keys in it, our property crime would start to drop.”
The report calculated each city’s safety ranking by measuring total crime rate, or the number of crimes committed per thousand residents in one year, and police adequacy rate, which is the number of total crimes divided by the number of law enforcement employees in the city.
Greenwich has the second highest proportion of law enforcement officials to residents in the top 50 safest cities, which gives us one of the highest police adequacy rates in the state.
“We’re a full service department, meaning we do everything ourselves, in-house,” Zuccerella said. “We have a robust detective division, we have a marine division, we have a motor unit with motorcycles, we have our own forensics testing.”
Lieutenant Zuccerella said that having a staff of 154 police officers allows Greenwich to be proactive about crime, and address neighborhood concerns before they escalate to criminal offenses.
“At any given moment in the town of Greenwich there are at least eleven police officers driving around,” Zuccerella said. “Since we have a larger department, we can send people to address an issue when we first see it coming up rather than always reacting to it.”
Greenwich’s high safety ranking is particularly impressive considering its large population size. With 63,075 residents, it is well over twice as populous as all of the other cities with safety scores in the top 15, and it is triple the size of most high-ranking cities. The second highest ranking city with a comparable population size is Bristol, which came in 40th with a population of 60,184 residents.
Lieutenant Zuccerella credits this success to the unique culture of Greenwich, which is able to maintain a small town feel in a city of over 60,000 people.
“The town is one big community,” Zuccerella said. “When you have a mentality that says ‘this is my neighborhood, and we’re not going to let crime happen’, you get this community village approach where the population cares for and looks after themselves. It makes you proud, and when you’re proud of something you act and do things differently.”
Connecticut as a whole is one of the safest states in America, and its violent crime rate is only 56% of the national average. From the findings of this report, Greenwich residents can sleep soundly knowing that they live in one of the safest cities in the country.
To access the full report, click here: https://www.alarms.org/safest-cities-in-connecticut/
