How scores work
Each city gets two scores, and we never blend them into one number: the Safety Score and the TribeScore. Every number below is the one the site uses. Where we lack enough data, a city shows “Insufficient verified data” and no score.
TribeScore: Jewish community
How much Jewish life a city has, from 0 to 100. It is a weighted average of the inputs below, each put on a 0 to 1 scale first.
| Input | Weight | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Jewish population | 40 of 100 | 0 at 1,000 people or fewer, full marks at 2,000,000 or more, on a log scale |
| Synagogues | 25 of 100 | 0 at none, full marks at 600 or more, on a log scale |
| Kosher food | 20 of 100 | 0 at none, full marks at 300 or more, on a log scale |
| Jewish schools | 10 of 100 | 0 at none, full marks at 100 or more, on a log scale |
| Mikvah and Chabad | 5 of 100 | 0 at none, full marks at 50 or more, on a log scale |
A missing input is left out and its weight is shared among the inputs we have; we never fill it in. A city needs a jewish population figure and at least 2 other inputs. Counts of places come from the lists on each city page, with their sources and the date we checked them.
Safety Score: reported antisemitic events
How the antisemitic events reported in a city recently compare with what is normal for that city. It is not a crime rate and it is not safety advice.
Which events count
Events we have collected from news reports and grouped into one entry each (see the feed). Each type has a weight:
| Event type | Weight |
|---|---|
| Assault | 5 |
| Attack or plot | 5 |
| Threat or harassment | 2 |
| Vandalism | 2 |
| Campus or institutional | 1 |
Recent against normal
- Recent: the weighted events of the last 56 days (8 weeks). An event counts less as it ages: half its weight after 21 days.
- Normal: the same city's weighted events from day 57 to day 420 back (or as far back as our record is complete), turned into what the recent figure would read at that steady rate.
- Ratio: (recent + 5) ÷ (normal + 5). Adding 5 to both sides stops one or two events in a quiet city from swinging the score.
- Small cities lean on their country: the city's own ratio counts n ÷ (n + 12), where n is its number of events in the normal period; the rest comes from the same ratio for the whole country. A city whose score is mostly its country's says so.
- Score: 70 − 20 × log₂(ratio), kept between 5 and 95. 70 means about normal; each doubling of the recent rate takes 20 points off, each halving adds 20.
| Score | Label |
|---|---|
| 80–95 | Quieter than usual |
| 60–79 | Normal for here |
| 40–59 | Elevated |
| 5–39 | High |
The arrow beside a score is its change over the last 4 weeks.
When there is no Safety Score
- Our event record has fewer than 12 complete weeks.
- The country has fewer than 20 events in the normal period, so there is nothing steady to lean on.
- Cities in Israel: Israeli cities show TribeScore only.
Compared only within a country
Each score measures a city against its own normal, and reporting differs a great deal between countries. So we only rank cities on safety against other cities in the same country.
Honest limits
- Events come from what the press reports. Places that are under-reported can look quieter than they are.
- An event marked News report has not yet been checked by a person; ✓ Verified means one of our team has.
- Place counts are the places we could verify in the sources we checked. Where a source stops listing past a limit, the count is shown as a minimum.