Stillwater has once again been ranked one of the safest places to live in New York State.

According to a study released by ValuePenguin this week, the village and town were ranked in the Top 10 for safety among more than 200 other state municipalities.

The staff at ValuePenguin, based in New York City, compared and analyzed a variety of crime metrics they sourced from the FBI across 215 cities & towns in New York, said company spokesperson Madison Reed.

“When deciding where to live, we know that safety is a top priority,” Reed said.

The study methodology

To rank these places, ValuePenguin collected data from the 2013 FBI crime statistics by city, which provides the most recent crime data available. Not every town participates in the report and the company also excluded towns with fewer than 5,000 residents because towns with small populations are more sensitive to crime score fluctuations for fewer crimes committed.

The raw data report included property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson), and violent crimes (murder/manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) from all law enforcement agencies that chose to partake in the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program.

ValuePenguin standardized the data to reflect violent and property crimes per 100,000, to account for population. Then, the researchers aggregated a “crime score” by weighting violent crime at 90 percent and property crime at 10 percent.

Though property crime is more prevalent, ValuePenguin figured that violent crime is more concerning to town residents. Finally, researchers adjusted the crime score for population size, giving more slack to larger cities. The cities based on their crime scores.

By comparison, the City of Albany was ranked No. 209 in safety compared to Stillwater No. 10. Stillwater was also ranked one notched higher (No. 9) among small cities with populations of 5,000-10,000 residents.

Back in January, 2014, Stillwater New York was named the 7th Safest Place in New York State, according to real estate web site Movoto.com. The website claimed there were just 36 reported crimes in 2012 — none of them violent.

More about the researchers

According to the researcher’s website, ValuePenguin is a company which focuses on providing high quality resources to help consumers understand the topics they’re interested in. Whether it’s building visual tools to explain data or publishing in-depth research our goal is to provide objective analysis to help guide you to the best decision. In the process of developing our research, we focus on Value, assessing whether the return of a particular purchase or decision is worth the cost or risk of that option, and how this stacks up with the other possible choices you may have.