Is Anacortes, Washington Safe? Safest Neighborhoods & Other Stats (2026)

The Numbers in Context: How Anacortes Compares

Raw crime figures without a benchmark are almost useless — and in Washington state, the benchmark matters more than almost anywhere else in the country. Start there.

The State Baseline Problem

Washington state's 2024 property crime rate of 2,467 offenses per 100,000 residents placed it third-worst nationally. That figure dwarfs Anacortes's 14.9 per 1,000 (equivalent to 1,490 per 100,000). In other words, Anacortes's property crime rate runs substantially below what you'd expect from a random Washington city of similar size.

Violent crime tells an even cleaner story. Anacortes recorded 1 violent crime per 1,000 residents in 2024 — below both the Washington state average and the national average, according to CrimeGrade.org. The city's estimated annual cost of crime per resident is $123, which is $135 below the national average and $124 below Washington's statewide average.

The Trend Line

The direction of travel is as important as the current level. City-Data.com's 2023 analysis showed a 35% year-over-year crime reduction in Anacortes. Washington state's own WASPC annual report (released July 2025) confirmed that violent crimes dropped 7.6% and property crimes fell 13.4% across the state between 2023 and 2024. Anacortes's five-year trajectory shows declines in both categories.

What stands out in that table: Anacortes's violent crime is one of the lower figures you'll find in any Washington city. Property crime is the category worth watching — it's elevated by national standards, though it tracks well below what the rest of the state experiences.

Property Crime: What It Looks Like on the Ground

The 14.9 per 1,000 property crime rate deserves honest treatment rather than spin. It means roughly one in every 67 residents experiences a property crime in a given year. That's not trivial. The question is what type, and where.

What 'Property Crime' Actually Means Here

In a small harbor city with active tourism — the island ferry terminal, summer boating traffic through the downtown marina, and visitors accessing Washington Park — the property crime mix skews heavily toward vehicle break-ins and opportunistic theft rather than burglary. Unlocked cars near the ferry dock and marina parking areas are the most commonly cited targets. A vehicle parked overnight in ferry staging with valuables visible is a different risk profile than a locked garage in Skyline.

The practical takeaway for most residents: standard precautions matter more here than in a landlocked suburb. Don't leave bags in plain sight in a car near the ferry terminal, lock sheds and outbuildings, and don't mistake Anacortes's low violent-crime profile for zero risk of having something stolen.

The Seasonal Dimension

Anacortes swells with summer visitors who are cycling the Guemes Channel Trail, catching ferries to the islands, and passing through on their way to Deception Pass. More transient foot traffic during June through August correlates, in most waterfront towns, with a temporary uptick in petty theft. Long-term residents know to treat their summer street differently than a quiet February Tuesday — this is the seasonal quirk that surprises people who moved here in winter and assumed the pace never changed.

By November, the ferry crowds thin, Commercial Avenue quiets, and the city returns to the rhythms of a working small town anchored by the refinery corridor. The property crime picture shifts noticeably with the calendar.

Neighborhood Safety Across Anacortes

Anacortes doesn't have a high-crime district in the way that a city of 80,000 might. Its geographic compactness — essentially one island connected by a bridge — keeps the safety picture relatively uniform. That said, neighborhoods do have distinct characters that affect day-to-day experience, and some are worth understanding before you choose a street. For a deeper look at what makes each area tick, see the neighborhood guide.

Old Town / Downtown Core

The Commercial Avenue corridor is the social and commercial spine of Anacortes — anchored by a mix of independent restaurants, a brewpub, and longtime local taverns. It's well-lit, frequently foot-trafficked, and has the benefit of volunteer auxiliary patrols. As the densest pedestrian area in the city, it also sees the highest concentration of opportunistic property crime — largely vehicle break-ins in parking areas rather than anything more serious.

Residents who walk to dinner on Commercial Ave without any safety concern are describing the norm. The catch is overnight street parking with valuables visible.

Skyline

The elevated, residential western neighborhoods sit away from the tourist and ferry traffic that characterizes the waterfront. Streets here tend to be quiet, lower-traffic, and populated by long-term residents. Among Anacortes neighborhoods, this area carries the quietest day-to-day safety profile — you're far from the ferry staging, and the neighborhood's elevation and dead-end streets reduce through-traffic naturally.

March Point

The eastern industrial corridor — home to oil refinery operations that have anchored the local economy for decades — is functionally industrial land. It's not a residential safety concern in the conventional sense, but it's worth understanding that this peninsula is working-industrial rather than walkable neighborhood. People don't live on March Point; it's the refinery zone that shapes the city's economic identity.

Anaco Beach, Similk Beach, and Rancho San Juan Del Mar

These quieter, lower-density areas on the outskirts of the island sit well outside the commercial core and see minimal through-traffic. Property crime risk drops considerably when you're not near ferry staging or the marina. Residents here often cite the tradeoff honestly: less convenient to downtown amenities, but noticeably more removed from the activity that drives petty theft.

Guemes Island

A short ferry ride off the Anacortes waterfront, Guemes Island is technically part of Skagit County but not policed by the Anacortes Police Department — it falls under the Skagit County Sheriff. The resident community is small and tight-knit. By any reasonable measure, it's among the lowest-crime places in the region, though its remoteness means emergency response times are longer than anything on the Anacortes mainland.

Rock Ridge (Rockridge)

A mid-city residential area with neither the downtown exposure nor the outer-island remoteness. Families with kids describe it as straightforward, low-drama, and thoroughly unremarkable in the best sense of the word — crime simply doesn't come up as a topic at the neighborhood level.

How the Anacortes Police Department Is Structured

For a city of 18,000, Anacortes operates a meaningfully built-out police department. Understanding the structure helps calibrate what response capacity actually looks like on a daily basis.

Patrol Operations

The Anacortes Police Department's Patrol Division responded to 8,457 calls for service in 2024. When fully staffed, 22 patrol officers work three shifts, each headed by a sergeant. That works out to roughly 7–8 officers per shift covering a geographically compact island city — not a thin presence for a community this size.

Alternative Response Team

One of the department's more notable structural additions is the Alternative Response Team, which pairs the city's community paramedic with a police department social worker. A social navigator and mental health professional, contracted through the Anacortes Family Center, rounds out the coordinated crisis-response model. This approach — routing mental health and social calls away from armed officers — reflects a deliberate investment in call-type matching that larger cities have struggled to implement at all.

Citizens Auxiliary Patrol

A volunteer citizens auxiliary patrol program has operated since 1992, supervised by the department's Crime Prevention Officer. Two volunteer groups — covering the downtown core and the west end of the city — serve as organized eyes on the ground in their respective areas. This kind of long-running volunteer infrastructure is unusual in a city this size and reflects the civic engagement that characterizes Anacortes more broadly.

Code and Parking Enforcement

A part-time code and parking enforcement position added in 2023 allows the department to address parking complaints, code violations, and abandoned vehicles without pulling patrol officers off higher-priority calls. It's a small structural change, but it's the kind of thing that keeps quality-of-life complaints from building into resentment.

What to Actually Watch For Before Choosing a Neighborhood

Safety research for Anacortes is a different exercise than for most cities. You're not trying to avoid a bad quarter of town — you're calibrating for the specific risk patterns that come with living in a ferry-connected, tourist-trafficked waterfront community.

Proximity to the Ferry Terminal and Marina

The island ferry dock and the downtown marina are the two locations most associated with vehicle break-ins and opportunistic theft. If you're considering a neighborhood within walking distance of either — portions of Old Town, the waterfront blocks north of Commercial Avenue — that's not a reason to rule it out, but it is a reason to develop habits around how you park and what you leave visible. The risk is real and seasonal; it's also entirely manageable for anyone who grew up near a busy waterfront.

The 'Six-Month Surprise' on Property Crime

People who move to Anacortes in fall or winter often feel like they've landed in one of the safest places on earth — quiet streets, locked-in community feel, almost no visible disorder. Then summer arrives, the ferry lines stretch down the hill, Commercial Avenue fills with visitors, and they realize the city they moved to in October is a different operating environment in July. This isn't a reason for alarm; it's a reason to set your expectations correctly and not be caught off-guard when the seasonal rhythm shifts.

Research the Street, Not Just the City

Anacortes's crime picture is compressed enough that neighborhood-level differences are modest. But streets matter more than quadrants here: a block off Commercial Avenue with direct sight lines to a marina parking lot carries different day-to-day exposure than a dead-end residential street in Skyline with no tourist traffic. Walk the street at different times of day before committing to a neighborhood. Talk to neighbors — Anacortes residents are notably forthcoming about what they actually observe.

What People Move Out For

Honest safety reporting includes the reasons people leave. The residents who move away from Anacortes rarely cite crime — the numbers and lived experience simply don't produce that complaint. They cite the ferry-dependency and the sense of being on a geographic island. They cite the limited commercial options relative to Bellingham or Mount Vernon. They mention that a city this size has finite anonymity — if you want to live somewhere where nobody knows your business, Old Town Anacortes will disappoint you quickly. These are quality-of-life friction points, not safety failures.

Quick Takeaways & FAQs

✅ Anacortes's violent crime rate of 1 per 1,000 sits below both Washington state and national averages, making it among the safer small cities in the region.

⚠️ Property crime at 14.9 per 1,000 is the honest caveat — real but concentrated near the ferry dock and downtown marina, and substantially below Washington state's own elevated baseline.

📍 A volunteer auxiliary patrol program covering the downtown core and the west end has operated continuously since 1992 — a level of community safety infrastructure that surprises most people new to the city.

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