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How much money are you saving? How much money do you pay on your credit card every month? How careful are you when you driving down the road?
Apparently, Colorado, you’ve got a long way to go. A new report from Wallet Hub, a financial services evaluator, says that when it comes to being safe, Colorado is right in the middle of the road. Wallet Hub’s 2014 Safest States to Live In report takes a holistic approach to safety, and includes five metrics: financial safety, driving safety, workplace safety, home safety, and risk of natural disasters. The company assign points to all those metrics, ranks out all the states, and found that Colorado lands at number 25.
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Colorado did best in Wallet Hub’s measure of workplace safety (number 13), which weighs factors like fatal workplace injuries, injury and illness rates, and employer health coverage.
But what about more traditional measures of safety? According to the National Incident Based Reporting System, reports of many major crime categories in Denver are way down when comparing January through May 2014 to the same period the year before. Murder? Down by almost half. Forcible sex offenses? Down by more than 20 percent (non-forcible sex offenses were down by more than 50 percent). Burglary? Down by 7 percent. Prostitution? Down by nearly half.
But it’s not all good news. Simple assaults were up by more than 47 percent. Stolen property reports up by more than 20 percent, roughly the same as the increase in drug violations. And some things were way up: Disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace reports were up by nearly 570 percent. Liquor law violations were also up by 590 percent. Restraining order violations were up by 92 percent, and criminal trespassing reports up by more than 250 percent.
So, Coloradans could definitely save more money, pay more attention on the roads, and watch what they’re doing at work to avoid injuries. But there’s also a lot of work to do with traditional crime categories like assault, stolen property and disturbing the peace.
Follow 5280 contributor AJ Vicens on Twitter.
Hover over Wallet Hub‘s color-coded map of safety to see each states ranking.
