Charleston, MO has a F safety grade (16/100) with a violent crime rate of 810 per 100,000, 130% above the national average.
Charleston is a small municipal reporter (4,447 on the UCR row). Per-100,000 violent and property rates are shown with MO and U.S. context.
Charleston, MO carries a PlainCrime F safety grade with violent crime 130% above the U.S. average
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Charleston, MO shows violent crime at 809.5 per 100,000 residents and property crime at 1,551.6 per 100,000. Violent crime runs 130% above the U.S. average. PlainCrime assigns grade F from those rates. Figures are voluntary agency submissions joined to population denominators; incomplete coverage can move the number.
The verdict
Charleston earns an F safety grade: violent crime runs 130% above the U.S. average, placing it among the highest-crime cities in the country.
Position in the state cohort
At 809.5 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Charleston ranks 17 of 272 — above 255 of the 271 other Missouri cities whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test. That is +339.2% against the cohort median of 184.3. Cities that did not report, or that reported implausibly low totals, are excluded from this cohort rather than counted as low-crime.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 34.3% of the 105 Part I offenses reported in Charleston for 2024, against a median of 13.4% across comparable Missouri cities — a gap of 20.8 points. Offense mix is shaped by which agencies report and how incidents are classified as well as by the underlying offenses, so it describes the reported record rather than a settled difference in conditions.
Comparable rate records
The nearest comparable 2024 records to Charleston's 809.5 violent-crime rate per 100,000 are Winona (807.3), Matthews (803.2), Normandy (779.7), Piedmont (863.9). These are same-year agency submissions that pass the same completeness screen, not a claim that the cities have identical conditions. They make the cohort position above checkable against named records instead of a generic state average.
Property-offense composition
Larceny-theft is 69.6% of reported property offenses in Charleston, against a cohort median of 78.6%. The remainder is burglary (8) and motor vehicle theft (13). Composition differences of this size usually track what kinds of places and property are present in a jurisdiction.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 793.1 per 100,000 in 2020 to 809.5 in 2024 (+2.1%). The highest observed value was 1134.5 in 2021 and the lowest 681.8 in 2022. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Property counts dominate Charleston's FBI UCR Table 8 municipal row. Per-100,000 rates use the reporting-year population on that row; cities that fail the completeness test stay out of rate rankings. A citywide figure rarely describes any single neighbourhood inside the municipal boundary.
Small-city offense counts above are voluntary UCR submissions, not neighbourhood advice. Year-to-year swings can look large when the population base is modest.
| Offense | Count | Rate /100K |
|---|---|---|
| Property Crime | 69 | 1551.6 |
| Larceny-Theft | 48 | 1079.4 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 13 | 292.3 |
| Burglary | 8 | 179.9 |
| Arson | 0 | 0 |
| Violent Crime | 36 | 809.5 |
| Aggravated Assault | 34 | 764.6 |
| Murder | 1 | 22.5 |
| Rape | 1 | 22.5 |
| Robbery | 0 | 0 |
Lead series · fell across 5 comparable years · FBI UCR
Secondary series · rose · 2020-2024 · FBI UCR
| Year | Coverage | Population | Violent Rate | Property Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Comparable | 5,422 | 793.1 | 1623 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 4,936 | 1134.5 | 2127.2 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 4,987 | 681.8 | 1905 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 4,124 | 897.2 | 2206.6 |
| 2024 | Comparable | 4,447 | 809.5 | 1551.6 |
Charleston's crime figures on this page originate from Charleston Police Department's submission to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
This agency reports via NIBRS, the incident-based system that captures more detail per offense (multiple crimes per incident, victim/offender data) than the older summary counts.
Crime rates read differently at different scales, so these are the Missouri cities closest to Charleston in population. Their populations run from 4,314 to 4,618, against 4,447 here. Or use our side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two cities directly.
These Missouri cities report the closest violent-crime rates to Charleston's 809.5/100K (same FBI UCR vintage rules; size peers above are excluded so the two lists stay distinct).
Small-city read: Charleston is sourced from FBI UCR Table 8 for 2024; rates use that row's population.
Small-city rows use the same per-100,000 formula; a few unreported years can leave gaps in the trend table. Verify the agency's submission on FBI.gov UCR.
Disclaimer (small city): UCR counts here are informational only. They are not a victimization probability. Source: FBI UCR Program.
Small-city rate methodology for how Charleston's small city row is sourced and ranked.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program CIUS Table 8 municipal crime rates · 2024 Charleston, MO rates use the reporting-year population on the municipal row.
Bulk download: city crime dataset (CSV/JSON)
Every figure on PlainCrime is rendered directly from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) source data, no number is typed in by an editor. Charleston is scored as a small-city UCR reporter (4,447 on the row). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.