Numbeo’s Crime Index is the mirror image of its Safety Index. The two always sum to 100, so a city scoring 81.7 for crime is the same city scoring 18.3 for safety. It is built from surveys of residents and long-term locals, asking how worried they are about specific situations, including walking home alone.
That makes this a measure of lived experience rather than an official advisory. No government issued these rankings and no police force compiled them. What they capture is how the people who live somewhere assess their own daily risk, which is a different and often more useful signal than a homicide count.
It is also a different list. Compare it to any ranking built on killings and the top five barely overlap. Papua New Guinea’s capital appears here and not there. Five American cities make this top 25. We are counting down from number 15 to the city where residents feel least secure of anywhere on earth.
#15. Guayaquil, Ecuador: 74.7
Guayaquil is Ecuador’s largest city and its main port, and it is the one entry here that also sits near the top of homicide-based rankings, reflecting how quickly conditions have changed.
Ecuador was until recently among the calmer countries in South America. Its position between the coca-producing zones of Colombia and Peru, its dollarised economy and its busy container ports made it strategically valuable, and trafficking organisations moved in.
Prison massacres inside the city’s penitentiary complex have been among the most extreme episodes of carceral violence recorded anywhere. For most visitors Guayaquil is a transit point to the Galapagos, and the airport corridor and Malecon riverfront are heavily policed.