Chatham Township Safest Place to Live in NJ, Report Says

Chatham Township is the safest place to live in New Jersey thanks to its low crime rate, most notably its zero violent crimes in 2012, according to Movoto Real Estate.

The study of New Jersey towns with at least 10,000 residents used the FBI's 2012 crime report and examined violent crime (rape, murder and assault), property crime (theft, burglary and motor vehicle thefts) and the chance a resident will be a victim of a crime, according to Movoto.

"For violent crime and property crime, we calculated the number of transgressions per resident," according to the report. "In order to determine a resident's chances of being the victim of a crime, we used the total number of crimes in the city. Then, we ranked each city from one to 238 across the three criteria. The lower the number was, the better the city's score."

Chatham Township, with a population of about 11,000, was the only municipality in the study with no violent crimes and just 46 property crimes in 2012, according to the report.

"In other words, that's just a 1 in 223 chance for residents to be the victim of any crime, and that is pretty darn in impressive," the report states.

Nearby Florham Park and Bernards Township also made the top-10:

1. Chatham Township
2. Mahwah
3. Sparta
4. Bernards
5. Hasbrouck Heights
6. Berkeley Heights
7. Florham Park
8. Ringwood
9. Tenafly
10. Lincoln Park

Chatham Borough was excluded from the study since its population is less than 10,000. Madison, which ranked ninth in a recent study of towns with at least 15,000 people, was rated No. 24 in Movoto's survey.

Asbury Park was considered the state's least-safest community with 2012 stats showing 1,491 crimes, 344 of which were violent, Movoto reported. The 16,625 residents had a 1 in 11 chance of being a victim of a crime, according to the report.

In addition to Asbury Park, Camden, Atlantic City, Irvington and Bridgeton were the state's most dangerous communities, each with more than 1,000 crimes in 2012, according to Movoto.