Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is closing out 2025 by reiterating her claim that Boston is the safest major city in America — or even the safest city, period. But a GBH News analysis casts doubt on that claim.
Wu has previously cited homicide data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association to back up her statements about Boston’s safety relative to other communities across the country. However, the latest MCCA report for 2025 shows several communities with lower per capita homicide rates through September of this year — including San Francisco, Honolulu, El Paso, Fresno, Omaha, Tampa, Orlando, Salt Lake City and Mesa.
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, told GBH News that crime data routinely puts Boston in the ranks of America’s safest cities. Still, he said describing it as the “safest city” or “safest major city” based on one particular period of time is inherently risky.
“When crime goes up and spikes upward, it tends to drop following that,” Fox said. “And when you have particularly low points, like we did last year, the tendency is to go up a little bit.
“I would say [Boston] is one of the safest cities,” he added. “There are a few like us that are safe at that level, and we’re one of the safest, and some years we are the safest.”
Whatever the merits of Wu’s comparison of Boston to other cities around the country, it does seem clear that Boston is safer right now than it has been at other times in the city’s history. Last year, there were only 24 homicides in Boston — a 67-year low, according to Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox — and the 31 homicides to date in 2025 represent the second-lowest total in the last 20 years.
Wu made her remarks at an end-of-year public safety press conference at the city’s new EMS training facility in West Roxbury, where she was joined by the leaders of Boston’s various public safety teams.
“It’s because of the care, the hard work, and the empathy of these teams that Boston is the safest major city in the country,” Wu said. “So over the last year, our public safety teams responded to hundreds of thousands of incidents: firefighters rushing into burning buildings, EMTs providing care after traffic collisions, police officers putting themselves in danger to keep all of us safe.”
After touting the expansion of Boston’s Community Safety Team, which is housed in the Boston Public Health Commission’s Office of Violence Prevention, and the awarding of more than 120 EMT course scholarships, Wu returned to the theme.
“This is what it means to be a home for everyone and to be fighting every day for the residents in every single neighborhood to live in the safest city in America, the best city for families, and to earn that trust with our actions 24 hours a day,” she said.
The mayor’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the current source of Wu’s claim.
A 2024 GBH News story examined Wu’s prior assertions about Boston’s safety record and found that the legitimacy of her “safest major city” claim depends on the time period covered, the safety metrics used and the way the term “major city” is defined.
According to Cox, despite Boston’s uptick in homicides in 2025, gun violence still remains significantly lower than it has been in the past.
“Going into the year, after receiving record low firearm violence numbers in 2024, the Boston Police Department has doubled our efforts in community policing with a focus on deterrence, achieving similar low levels this year once again,” Cox said. “Year to date, the number of shooting victims and incidents of gunfire in the city are both currently at historic lows, down ... more than 30% compared [to] our five-year average.”
Cox added that the BPD has made retail theft a higher priority, leading to a 113% increase in arrests for that crime in 2025, and increased both patrols and arrests downtown, with an accompanying 24% decline in violent crime.
In the area around the intersection of Melnea Cass Boulevard and Massachusetts Avenue, or “Mass. and Cass,” which has long been the epicenter of the city’s homelessness and drug crisis, arrests have increased by 54% and total violent crime has dropped by 8%, Cox said.
In his remarks, Boston’s police commissioner referenced the recent mass shooting at Brown University, saying that the BPD works closely “on a daily basis” with Boston’s college and university police forces. Cox also said Boston police have increased their visibility at Jewish institutions around the city in the wake of the recent mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia.
