Country-level reputations hide the one place that breaks the pattern. Baltimore sits 26 points below the US average, Athens is the weakest link in famously safe Greece, and even Japan — the safest country we score — has an exception. These are the outliers you'd never expect.
The United States averages a solid 82.6/100 across the cities we score — but Baltimore sits at just 57, a 26-point drop and the widest "safe country, one unsafe city" gap in our data.
Travel advice runs on country labels. "Japan is safe." "France is safe." "The US is fine." Those labels are mostly true — and they quietly flatten the one place inside each country that doesn't fit. We took every country with at least four scored cities, worked out that country's own average city safety score, and then looked for the cities sitting furthest below their national baseline. To keep the contrast honest we only kept countries whose average is genuinely high (72 or above), so each row below is a real outlier: a safe country with one city that breaks the pattern.
| City | Country | City score | Country avg | Gap below |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baltimore, United States | United States | 57 | 82.6 | −25.6 |
| New Orleans, United States | United States | 57 | 82.6 | −25.6 |
| Detroit, United States | United States | 58 | 82.6 | −24.6 |
| Memphis, United States | United States | 60 | 82.6 | −22.6 |
| Manila, Philippines | Philippines | 58 | 76.9 | −18.9 |
| Delhi, India | India | 58 | 75.1 | −17.1 |
| Tijuana, Mexico | Mexico | 57 | 73.4 | −16.4 |
| Guayaquil, Ecuador | Ecuador | 57 | 73.0 | −16.0 |
| Cartagena, Spain | Spain | 69 | 84.0 | −15.0 |
| Mexico City, Mexico | Mexico | 59 | 73.4 | −14.4 |
| Kochi, Japan | Japan | 80 | 93.7 | −13.7 |
| Naples, Italy | Italy | 69 | 82.6 | −13.6 |
| Athens, Greece | Greece | 76 | 87.3 | −11.3 |
| Marseille, France | France | 73 | 84.0 | −11.0 |
| Brussels, Belgium | Belgium | 76 | 86.2 | −10.2 |
Two different stories produce the same shape. In high-scoring rich countries — the US, Japan, Italy, Greece, France, Belgium, Spain — the outlier is usually a single city carrying concentrated, well-documented crime or unrest against an otherwise calm national backdrop: Baltimore, Naples, Marseille, Athens. In middle-scoring countries that still clear our safe bar, the outlier tends to be the largest metropolis or a border hub — Mexico City, Tijuana, Manila, Delhi, Guayaquil — where scale and inequality pull one place well under the national line. Either way, the traveller's mistake is the same: trusting the country label and skipping the city.
Read the city, not the country. If your trip runs through one of these outliers, the fact that the surrounding country is safe tells you very little about the specific streets you'll be on. Check the city's own score and its neighbourhood breakdown before you book the central-but-cheap hotel, plan arrivals in daylight, and treat the national reputation as background, not guidance. None of these cities is "off-limits" — several are major, rewarding destinations. They just deserve the attention their country's good name tends to talk you out of.
We took one row per city (the largest-population entry, excluding New York's boroughs) with a Kakapo overall safety score. For every country with at least four scored cities we computed the mean of those city scores, kept only countries averaging 72 or higher, then ranked each country's cities by how far they fall below that average. We surfaced the largest, most recognisable exceptions and dropped a handful of ambiguous same-name micro-towns and one data-quality outlier. Full weighting is at https://kakapo.travel/about/methodology. Scores are comparative model estimates, not law-enforcement statistics.
Free to cite in journalism, research or content — all we ask is a link back. Copy the attribution below:
Kakapo Editorial Team (2026). Safe Country, Unsafe City: The Outliers You'd Never Expect. Kakapo. https://kakapo.travel/blog/safe-country-unsafe-city-2026
Writing a destination, city-safety or data story? We give journalists custom data pulls at no cost — the full outlier table, any single country's city-by-city breakdown, or the reverse cut (the safe city in an otherwise-risky country). Email [email protected] and we usually reply the same day.
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Kakapo publishes real safety scores for every destination, drawing on national travel advisories, local crime data, healthcare infrastructure, and night-safety measures. Kakapo Studies is our research imprint — independent editorial, no advertiser influence on scores. Contact: [email protected].