Photo by Danilo Lewis

A new poll by Gallup reports that 72 percent of residents of the greater Washington area say they feel safe walking alone at night. That figure puts the D.C. region in the median of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, tied with Columbus, Ohio; San Jose, Calif.; and Philadelphia. Twenty-seven percent said the D.C. area is not safe at night.

The survey, based on criteria from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, gauges how Americans felt walking around their cities in 2012. The average of all metropolitan areas was 71 percent, putting the D.C. area just slightly in the top half of all regions studied, and exactly at the national average of 72 percent.

Of course, the regions included in the poll are quite large. The Washington metropolitan statistical area includes the District, Northern Virginia, southern Maryland, and a sliver of West Virginia. But as for D.C. itself, city officials touted crime statistics earlier this year as signs the District is becoming safer.

At a January press conference reviewing last year’s crime numbers, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier proudly announced homicides hit a 50-year-low in 2012 at 88. However, Lanier also said then that the overall number of violent crimes in D.C. actually increased by three percent last year, taking into account sexual assaults, robberies, and assaults with deadly weapons. Street robberies in particular shot up quite a bit in the first few months of 2012, especially when victims were targeted for their mobile phones, but eventually leveled off to remain even with 2011.

In the Gallup survey, though, people felt the safest in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, with 80 percent of respondents saying they are comfortable walking alone in the dark.