What Does That Even Mean?
According to Summit Defense Criminal Lawyers, you are less likley to get arrested in Washington, Michigan, and Vermont, than in any other states in the nation. How you take that is a matter of personal preference.
Criminals might think, damn, better places to commit crimes, and that might be correct. The calculations were based on metrics like arrests and police presence per 100K residents. But it mimght just be that those states at the opposite end arrest peoplle for crap that shouldn’t be considered a crime or that is presumed arrest-worthy but is not.
You’d have to compare this data against a range of results for actual reported crimes (not just crimes charged or convicted). People lie, criminals lie, and cops lie. In other words, this data only tells us about places where cops are more or less likely to arrest people per capita, and that makes sense.
The research is attributed to a firm that specializes in criminal defense. If you are more likely to get arrested, you may well be in need of their services.
New Hampshire ranked 9th for most arrests, by the way.
For comparison, if we look at safest states reports from online resources for 2025, the top three, without debate, are Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine (with Maine and New Hampshire changing places depending on the survey). But we know crime in Vermont has been on the rise. Unsolved case loads are climbing. Anecdotal data about drugs and trafficking can’t be ignored, but if law enforcement is ignoring them, or not arresting criminal illegals, is Vermont truly safer?
I’m not here to tell you it’sn’t only that surveys are interesting distractions, make for clickable content, and human nature is a better indicator.
Vermont ranks in the top twenty for net migration in some studies and the top 25 in others, so it is not unattractive nationally. People are still willing to move there, probably from liberal enclaves with much higher crime. However, its tax and growth issues make it less attractive, so fewer arrests might not be indicative of anything unless we drill down into places like Burlington or Brattleboro, where drugs and crime have been on the rise.
We also can’t say whether the net migration is of legal residents or illegal immigrants. Vermont has a reputation for sanctuary status and welfare, and if you add low arrest rates, then the type of inflows might lead to less-than-positive outcomes long term.
In other words, we don’t know what we don’t know.
We know that Vermont’s tax burden is one of the highest in the nation. Its majority Democrat legislature, even after taking a bit of a beating last November, is still obsessed with policies that make Vermont both more expensive and more attractive to criminals. Police staffing is down, caseloads are up, murder and property crime have been rising, and drug and human trafficking are also increasing.
If you’re into any of that, given the low number of arrests per capita, Vermont might be appealing, if you are also the sort of crook who searched online lists for places to do your dirty work.
Or Vermont is just less likely to arrest you for stupid crap.
Or it could be both.
