Cheney is among state's safest cities

With a good quality school system, well-maintained streets and a neighborly, small-town feel, Cheney has always been seen as a great place to live. According to a recently released survey by the consumer research company ValuePenguin, it’s also one of the safest cities in Washington state.

Cheney, with a 2013 population of 11,117, was ranked 38th out of 113 Washington cities with populations over 5,000. Airway Heights, with a population of 6,441, was ranked 58th while Spokane with a population of 209,524 was ranked 112th and Spokane Valley, at 90,835, came in at 92nd.

Seattle, the largest city in the state with a population of 642,815, was ranked 110th and Tacoma at 203,226, was 111th. The safest city in the state was Sammamish, population 49,805, while locally that honor went to Liberty Lake, population 7,979, which came in sixth.

“As a general trend with these studies, we see that smaller cities/towns have better safety numbers than larger places,” study co-author and ValuePenguin co-founder Brian Quinn said in an email. “That’s not a huge surprise, but there are always some exceptions in each state. For example, Sammamish, with a population of almost 50,000 ended up being the number one safest place on the list.”

The study used uniform crime report (UCR) data submitted by police departments to the FBI in 2013 — the latest year available — for violent crimes, such as homicide, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault, along with property crimes like burglary, arson and theft. The data was then standardized to reflect incidents per every 100,000 people, and then weighted, with violent crime weighted at 90 percent and property crime at 10 percent.

According to the Cheney Police Department’s year-end Monthly Accountability Report (MAR), overall crime in the city in 2013 decreased just over 20 percent compared to 2012 numbers. Those figures rose 12.37 percent in 2014 with 606 total incidents, still below the 759 reported in 2010.

While the ValuePenguin study rankings reflect well on Cheney, they do need to be taken with a grain of informational salt. Cheney Police Cmdr. Rick Campbell said the MAR is actually an “amalgamation” of data from the FBI’s UCR and the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS). In December 2006, Washington received NIBRS compliance, and Cheney meets those state NIBRS requirements while the FBI is in the process of switching to the NIBRS system.

“The numbers are going to look a little different,” Campbell said in an email about MAR data. “Once Cheney files our NIBRS report with the state, it is converted by the state to UCR to send to the FBI for their records.”

Campbell said MAR numbers would typically be higher than FBI numbers since it looks at all calls of a particular type. The UCR looks incident reports that are generated.

“ValuePenguin looked only at ‘aggravated assaults’ and didn’t look at ‘simple assaults’ and ‘mutual combat,” Campbell said. “Both would be indicated in the MAR as assaults.”

ValuePenguin study co-author Quinn said they are in the process of conducting research and look to publish reports in every state.

“Our hope is that these reports can highlight which cities and towns are doing an exceptional job in providing their residents with a safe place to live,” he said.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.