Where Is The Most Dangerous Place In Maine?

NOTE: The story “Where is the Most Dangerous Place in Maine?” refers to cities and towns, which are ranked by crime rates. It does not reference specific streets or businesses, including those in the stock image that accompanies the story.

Movoto, the real estate brokerage site, just published a ranking of the most dangerous places in Maine. How safe is your city or town?

Overall, they looked at cities and towns with more than 5,000 people and the FBI's 2013 Uniform Crime Report. They then ranked places based on murders, violent crimes, and property crimes.

Maine may be one of the safest states in the country, but as we know we still experience a lot of crime in our cities and towns.  Ask anybody in law enforcement, and chances are that they'd attribute a lot of the crime to drug abuse.

Here's how Movoto ranked the Most Dangerous Place In Maine, and why:

1. Augusta:  "Augusta comes in at the top of the list for having the most property crimes per capita in the state. This, plus its 68 violent crimes (including one murder, 25 rapes, 16 robberies, and 26 assaults) gave Augusta the highest number of crimes per person in the state. Residents had just a 1 in 15 chance of being the victim of a crime."
2. Biddeford: "When it comes to violent crime, it doesn’t get any more dangerous than Biddeford. Well, as far as Maine goes."
3. Bangor:  "Of all the places we looked at, Bangor had the fifth highest number of murders per person in 2013."
4. Waterville: "In 2013, Waterville had a total of 847 crimes for its population just shy of 16,000 residents, giving it the fifth most crimes per person."
5. Skowhegan: "Because of its smaller population, Skowhegan had the second highest number of total crimes per person in the state."
6. Portland: "The largest city in Maine is also one of the most violent, with the fifth highest number of violent crimes per person."
7. Sanford: With a population just shy of 21,000 people and a total of 70 violent crimes for the year, Sanford had the third highest number per person in this category."
8. Auburn: "Auburn had the sixth highest number of property crimes per person in our analysis."
9. South Portland: "This city had more violent crime per person than nearly any other place we looked at for 2013."
10. Lewiston: "Auburn and Lewiston may be the same in many ways, but Lewiston ranked two lower, making it No. 10 on our list."

Where does your city or town rank?  Let's look below.

Now, don't pack up your bags and call the movers just yet, Movoto also recently ranked Maine as being the fifth safest state in the country!

1. New Hampshire
2. Idaho
3. Vermont
4. North Dakota
5. Maine

The folks at Movoto had this to say about our fine state; " This state had the lowest violent crime ranking, at only 121 of those crimes per 100,000 people. It also didn’t hurt that the murders here were the eighth lowest on our list."