HOUSTON – I’m not trying to scare you with this story, but I also don’t think it’s a stretch to say we’re living in frightening times, and a recent study is confirming it again.
With all the wild news my colleagues and I have been covering, we’re all trying to keep from biting our nails, but a recent WalletHub study is reiterating those fears by naming Texas the third least safe state in the U.S.
Researchers looked at all 50 states and compared data ranging from assaults per capita to the loss amount from climate disasters and the unemployment rate. Texas ranked 48th, making it the 3rd least safe state between Florida and Mississippi.
This was the second time WalletHub gave the Lone Star State this ranking.
2024 REPORT: Texas named one of the LEAST safest states in America, study says 😨
Louisiana was ranked the least safe, while Vermont was named the safest.
So how do we keep ourselves from freaking out? Jake Wegmann, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told WalletHub:
“The academic literature is quite clear that more cops = less crime. In the United States, we are incarcerating people at a rate several times in excess of our peer nations– we are likely long past the point where we are getting much benefit in terms of crime reduction from how much we are locking people up. We are probably worsening crime in some instances by taking people out of communities for committing relatively minor crimes. But policing is the opposite– our rates of police officers per capita are lower than in the European Union. One of our safest big cities, New York City, has an unusually high rate of police per capita. Ideally, we would shrink the prison system, ideally by drastically shortening sentences, making much greater use of parole and other non-prison strategies, and plow some of the savings into social spending as well as hiring more cops.”
RELATED: Texas ranked among worst states in the US for health care: WalletHub
Check out the full report by WalletHub and how other states compare by clicking here.